#TELESCOPE SPACE FULL#

“This event blew me away,” said Alan Dressler, an astronomer at the Carnegie Observatory who was instrumental in planning for the telescope 30 years ago. “We’re made out of the same stuff in this landscape.”įrom astronomers and at watch parties around the globe, there was uniform relief and praise. “We humans really are connected to the universe,” she said.

#TELESCOPE SPACE FULL#

Straughn added that she could not help thinking about the scale of the nebula, full of stars with planets of their own. “It took me awhile to figure out what to call out in this image,” Amber Straughn, deputy project scientist for the telescope, said as she pointed to a craggy structure.ĭr. Seen in infrared, the nebula resembled a looming, eroded coastal cliff dotted with hundreds of stars that astronomers had never seen before. The most striking image was of the Carina nebula, a vast, swirling cloud of dust that is both a star nursery and home to some of the most luminous and explosive stars in the Milky Way. “I’m gobsmacked.”Īnother view of the Southern Ring nebula, in mid-infrared light. “Possibly, the formation of PAHs in these stars is a very important part of how life got started,” said Bruce Balick, an emeritus professor of astronomy at the University of Washington. Such molecules drift through space, settling in clouds that then give birth to new stars, planets, asteroids - and whatever life might subsequently sprout. Indeed, the image revealed a band of dust that was being heated up as two of the galaxies ripped stars from each other.Ī view of the Southern Ring nebula, the remnants of an exploded star, revealed hints of complex carbon molecules known as polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, or PAHs, floating in its midst. Four are so closely engaged in a gravitational dance that they will eventually merge. One infrared skyscape showed Stephan’s Quintet, five galaxies packed improbably tightly in the constellation Pegasus. A few miles away at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, an overflow crowd of astronomers whooped and hollered, oohed and aahed, as new images flashed on the screen - evidence that their telescope was working even better than hoped.

The new pictures were rolled out during an hourlong ceremony at the Goddard Space Flight Center that was hosted by Michelle Thaller, the center’s assistant director for science communication, with video stops around the world. Webb’s first deep field image, showing the galaxy cluster SMACS 0723. The first stars were composed of pure hydrogen and helium left over from the Big Bang, and they could grow far more massive than the sun - and then collapse quickly and violently into supermassive black holes of the kind that now populate the centers of most galaxies. The farther away a star or galaxy lies, the older it is, making every telescope a kind of time machine.Īstronomers theorize that the most distant, earliest stars may be unlike the stars we see today. To observe a star 10 light-years away is to see it as it existed 10 years ago, when the light left its surface. Light travels at a constant 186,000 miles per second, or close to six trillion miles per year, through the vacuum of space. To look outward into space is to peer into the past. The light from those galaxies, magnified into visibility by the gravitational field of the cluster, originated more than 13 billion years ago.

The image, of a distant star cluster called SMACS 0723, revealed the presence of still more-distant galaxies spilled across the sky. President Biden offered a preview on Monday afternoon when he introduced what NASA officials and astronomers hailed as the deepest image yet taken of the cosmos, a mark that will probably be passed before the week is done as more data spews forth from NASA’s computers. John Mather, the senior project scientist on Webb and a Nobel Prize laureate for his work on the Big Bang, speaking to reporters at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., on Tuesday.

Telescope space