Just recently, the U.S. space agency NASA published the first series of images taken by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), showing some of the wonders of the universe in unparalleled quality and clarity. The remnants of a supernova explosion in orange and blue, the dance of galaxies caught in mutual gravitational embrace, the light from the very first galaxies in the universe, emitted over 13 billion years ago and refracted by the forces of gravity, can all be seen in unprecedented levels of detail.
“Each image is literally a new discovery that can tell people things they didn’t know before,” says Bill Nelson, administrator of NASA, “The eye of the new telescope can penetrate clouds of cosmic dust and gas, it can see light from the farthest reaches of the universe.”
One of the early targets of the James Webb telescope was the Stephan’s Quintet, a group of five galaxies 290 million light-years away in Pegasus. These galaxies have long been caught in the gravitational embrace of each other and before the inevitable collision they perform the most complex “space dance”. Moreover, the two galaxies are already colliding and merging, heating up the gas and dust clouds, spurring the formation of new stars “on the collision line”.
The next image is the famous Carina Nebula, located 7,600 light-years away in the southern constellation of Kiel (Carina Nebula constellation). This nebula is the place where the most intense processes of formation of young stars take place, and most of these stars have a size far greater than the Sun. Because the telescope James Webb can see through clusters of gas and dust, the image shows hundreds of “newborn” stars, previously invisible to other telescopes, and the flows and whirlpools of gas and dust form such amazing structures, the shape of which scientists can’t even determine.
Another image shows the Southern Ring Nebula, also called the Eight-Burst Nebula. It’s a cloud of gas and dust left behind by a dying massive star 2,500 light years away. The image shows us a bright orange foam of molecular hydrogen bubbling around the blue mist of ionized gas spewed by the doomed star at the center of the nebula. But if you look closely, you can see a second, less bright star next to the bright blue star. Scientists have long known that the Southern Ring Nebula hides a binary star system, and the current image from the JWST telescope is the first ever to show a second star in this system.
