How the James Webb Space Telescope transformed astronomy this year. | via NPR
James Webb Space Telescope launched on December 25, 2021. Its first images - like this one of the Carina Nebula - stunned researchers."JWST was launched on Christmas day, and then was a present that took six months to unwrap," said Jane Rigby, an astronomer at NASA and the Operations Project Scientist.The Pillars of Creation were first photographed by Hubble in 1995. Webb's image reveals countless newly formed stars glistening amongst the columns of gas and dust.
The telescope is only five months into its science mission, and it's already transforming astronomy. The telescope's instruments have allowed it to capture previously unobservable planets, stars and galaxies near and far. Heidi Hammel is a planetary astronomer and an interdisciplinary scientist on the JWST Project. She joined the team in 2002 because she wanted to study the planet Neptune."When I first saw the image on my computer screen, I was so emotional," Hammel said."I first started crying, and then I started shouting and calling all my relatives to come look at this picture!"This is the clearest view of Neptune's rings in decades, taken by JWST.
Robertson is on a team of researchers who discovered the oldest galaxies ever observed. JWST's instruments allowed his team to identify galaxies up to 13.4 billion years old – galaxies that would have formed less than 400 million years after the Big Bang, a tiny fraction of the universe's lifetime.Hundreds of galaxies appear in this image, which combines near-infrared colors captured by Webb's telescope with those from Hubble.
"It's like opening a book that you've wanted to know the ending of for a long time but have been holding off on reading that concluding paragraph," Robertson said,"and then finally seeing the full story revealed to you.Jane Rigby, JWST's Operations Project Scientist, is also using the telescope to study distant galaxies.
JWST has already proven to be an incredible tool for astronomers, but its biggest discoveries are still yet to come, Rigby said.
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