The largest space telescope ever built is ready to show us what it has been observing for six months. But before NASA gives the world a slideshow of the James Webb Space Telescope’s first cosmic visits, the White House will provide a brief overview on Monday afternoon.
President Biden is about to unveil a “deep field” image captured by the observatory. Perhaps the Webb Telescope’s greatest promise is to observe some of the first stars to illuminate the universe after the Big Bang. While Monday’s snapshot can’t accomplish that, it’s a proof-of-principle of the technique and a clue to what more science instruments are waiting for that astronomers have been waiting decades to put into practice. line.
When will the image be revealed and how can I watch it?
The first image will be unveiled Monday at 5 p.m. by President Biden at the White House on NASA TV or the agency’s YouTube channel. The New York Times will also provide a live video feed.
What image are NASA and Biden showing?
On Friday, NASA released a list of five subjects that Webb had recorded with its instruments. But Mr. Biden will only show one at the White House on Monday.
The image is named SMACS 0723. It is a patch of sky visible from the southern hemisphere on Earth and often visited by Hubble and other telescopes in search of the distant past. It includes a massive cluster of galaxies about four billion light-years away that astronomers use as a kind of cosmic telescope. The cluster’s enormous gravitational field acts like a lens, distorting and magnifying light from galaxies behind it that would otherwise be too faint and distant to see.
Learn more about the James Webb Space Telescope
After traveling almost a million miles to reach a place beyond the moon, the James Webb Space Telescope will spend years observing the cosmos.
Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA associate administrator for space science, described the image as the deepest view yet into our cosmos’ past. Later images will surely look even further ahead, he added.
Marcia Rieke of the University of Arizona, who led the construction of one of the Webb telescope cameras with which the photo was taken, known as the NIRCam, said: “This image will not hold for long. the “deepest” record, but clearly shows the power of this telescope.
And the rest of the pictures?
NASA will show more images Tuesday at 10:30 a.m. Eastern Time in a live video stream that you can watch on NASA TV or YouTube. They will be on display at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.
The images are a sightseeing tour of the universe painted in colors that no human eye has seen – the invisible rays of infrared or heat radiation. A small team of astronomers and science outreach experts curated the images to show off the new telescope’s capabilities and knock the socks off the public. Among the cosmic images are old friends of amateur and professional astronomers, who can now see them in new infrared clothing.
There’s the Southern Ring Nebula, a shell of gas ejected from a dying star about 2,000 light-years away, and the Carina Nebula, a huge swirling expanse of gas and stars comprising some of the most massive and potentially explosive star systems in the world. Milky Way.
Yet another familiar astronomical scene is Stephan’s Quintet, a tight cluster of galaxies about 290 million light-years away in the constellation Pegasus.
The team will also release a detailed spectrum of an exoplanet known as WASP-96b, a gas giant half the mass of Jupiter that orbits a star 1,150 light-years away every 3.4 days. Such a spectrum is the kind of detail that could reveal what is in the atmosphere of this world.
Why did it take so long to share the first images of Webb?
Heading into space on Christmas Day last year was just the first step for the James Webb Space Telescope.
The spacecraft has been orbiting the second Lagrange point, or L2, about a million miles from Earth since Jan. 24. At L2, the gravitational forces of the Sun and Earth keep Webb’s motion around the Sun in sync with that of the Earth.
Before it got there, the parts of the telescope had to be carefully unfolded: the sunshade that keeps the instruments cool so they could accurately capture weak infrared light, the 18 gold-plated hexagonal pieces of the mirror.
For astronomers, engineers and officials watching on Earth, the deployment has been a tense time. There were 344 one-time failures, which means that if one of the actions hadn’t worked, the telescope would have ended up as useless space junk. They all worked.
The telescope’s four science instruments also had to be turned on. In the months following the telescope’s arrival at L2, its operators painstakingly aligned the 18 mirrors. In April, the mid-infrared instrument, or MIRI, which requires the coldest temperatures, was cooled to minus 447 degrees Fahrenheit, and scientists were able to begin a final round of checks. Once these and other steps were taken, the science could begin.
How does the Webb compare to the Hubble Telescope?
The main mirror of the Webb telescope is 6.5 meters in diameter, compared to 2.4 meters for that of Hubble, which gives Webb about seven times more light-gathering capacity and therefore the possibility of seeing further into the past. .
Another crucial difference is that Webb is equipped with cameras and other instruments that are sensitive to infrared radiation, or “heat.” The expansion of the universe causes light that would normally be in visible wavelengths to shift to longer infrared wavelengths that are normally invisible to the human eye.