NASA reveals first image from James Webb Space Telescope
We use your sign-up to provide content in ways you’ve consented to and to improve our understanding of you. This may include adverts from us and 3rd parties based on our understanding. You can unsubscribe at any time. More info
NASA’s James Webb Telescope has captured another spectacular image from the cosmos, this time an arrangement of newly-forming stars 6,500 light years away dubbed the “Pillars of Creation”. The newly-forming stars from the Eagle Nebula, the area brimming with gas and dust, were first captured by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope back in 1995, but the latest images have put the pillars on full display in some of the clearest detail spectators have ever seen. The Eagle Nebula is 6,500 light years away from Earth and is a young open cluster of stars.
The lush detail of this region of the Nebula, which looks like striking rocky mountains floating in outer space in NASA’s images, will reportedly help astronomers to count more accurately the quantities of gas and dust.
The newly-formed stars are bright red orbs that typically have so-called diffraction spikes and lie outside one of the dusty pillars. When knots with a large enough mass form inside the pillars of gas and dust, they start to collapse under their own gravity, gradually heating up to eventually form new stars.
The wavy lines that look like lava at the edges of some pillars are ejections from stars that are not yet fully formed within the gas and dust. Young stars also shoot out supersonic jets periodically that come into contact with clouds of material, such as these thick pillars.
Dr Megan Argo, senior lecturer at the University of Central Lancashire and Vice President of the Royal Astronomical Society, said: “The James Webb Space Telescope will be transformative for space research, as it will allow scientists to explore the universe in the infra-red.
“Infra-red is a part of the spectrum that lets researchers observe things that glow faintly because they are warm, such as planets, or cooler stars that would be too faint for the optical telescopes used to see stars similar to the sun.
“The James Webb telescope is significantly larger than its predecessors, which makes it much more sensitive. This will be significant in allowing scientists to explore how the very first stars formed after the Big Bang, billions of years in the past. We have never been able to observe this before and it will help with understanding how the universe came to look as it does today.
“The telescope will also help scientists study star and planet formation in the nearby universe, areas of astronomy where there are still many unanswered questions. It will also enable them to directly study the atmospheres of planets around other stars and search for chemical signatures that might indicate biological processes.”
Captured with James Webb’s Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam), the glowing bright red wavy lines can be seen at the edges of some pillars, revealing where the stars eject materials as they form.
The “Pillars of Creation” had been revisited back in 2014 by the Hubble Telescope, but many other observatories have also taken a close look at this region in space.
But thanks to James Webb’s ability to detect infrared light, which is essentially heat, it can take a look through the clouds to capture protostars springing into life from the dust in better detail than any other piece of equipment out there.
The Hubble telescope, on the other hand, has much weaker infrared detectors, which is why its images were nowhere near as jaw-dropping as James Webb’s.
Klaus Pontoppidan, a project scientist working on the James Webb, wrote on Twitter: “The nebula, M16, is located right in the plane of the Milky Way; there are just so many stars!. This image was taken in exactly the same way as the cosmic cliffs, and covers an area the same size on the sky.”
DON’T MISS
Elon Musk’s UK rival crashes rocket in sea after Iceland test fails [REPORT]
Putin’s energy threat backfires as Russia to bow to China [INSIGHT]
‘Major incident’ declared as all communication to Shetlands Isles CUT [REVEAL]
This comes after NASA’s James Webb captured another stunning image of the most distant star in the universe, located a mind-bending 28 billion light years away, back in August. Dub
Known as Earendel, it is double the distance of Icarus, the second furthest away at 14.4 billion light years. The constellation is between 50 and 100 times larger than the Sun, and probably burst into a supernova within a few million years of coming into existence.
Cosmic Spring astronomers wrote: “We’re excited to share the first JWST image of Earendel, the most distant star known in our universe, lensed and magnified by a massive galaxy cluster.”
But just like the “Pillars of Life”, the Hubble Space Telescope got there first, capturing an image of the monumental star several months earlier in April 2022.
Source: Read Full Article
