What is the Scientific Achievement of James Webb Telescope?
According to NASA "The James Webb Space Telescope will be a giant leap forward in our quest to understand the Universe and our origins. Webb will examine every phase of cosmic history: from the first luminous glows after the Big Bang to the formation of galaxies, stars, and planets to the evolution of our own solar system."
THE OBJECTIVE OF THE DISCUSSION IS TO ELICIT OPINIONS. THREADS OF LINKS REFERENCE ARE MOST UNWELCOME!
Webb telescope reveals an image of the first galaxies ever NASA's $10 billion new telescope showed the world something remarkable today: an image of some of the first galaxies to form in the universe.
https://www.npr.org/2022/07/11/1110810946/webb-telescope-pictures-nasa
The first image from NASA's James Webb Space Telescope offered humanity a stunning new view of the universe on Monday — a first-of-its-kind infrared image so distant in the cosmos that it shows stars and galaxies as they appeared 13 billion years ago.
https://www.nbcnews.com/science/space/james-webb-space-telescope-first-color-photo-rcna37584
Webb's unprecedented infrared sensitivity will help astronomers to compare the faintest, earliest galaxies to today's grand spirals and ellipticals, helping us to understand how galaxies assemble over billions of years.
https://webb.nasa.gov/content/science/index.html
Ahmed T. Hussein
Dear Professor,
Thank you for initiating this interesting discussion.
I recently read about it. Personally, I was excited to know about this because this telescope is going to excavate the origin of where we are living right now, the planet Earth.
However, I must also mention here that no where was any financial consideration involved, written. It would be great to know if any scientist or researcher writes in this thread about the cost/ expense involved with it.
Best regards,
Anamitra.
Nobody.
This is yet another clumsy attempt to pass photo shows as "scientific achievements" on the birth of the universe.
Too much money has been spent on maintaining this crazy show.
I have already expressed myself about it.
Very good topic for this new information, we hope to learn more about this interesting theme. Thank you a lot.
The combined high spatial and spectral resolution make the Webb telescope an ideal instrument for studying the dynamics of both globular clusters and clusters of galaxies. New insights into dark matter and dark energy may emerge. It is a powerful tool.
Thank you Dr. Anamitra Roy for your comment.
As for your inquiry concerning the "financial consideration involved", it has already been announced that the James Webb Space Telescope cost over $10 billion and took more than 20 years to build.
Many thanks for Dr.s Yehya A. Salih , Terri Purvis
, & Shaker A.N. Al-Jadaan for expressing your interest in the topic!
Charles Ivie .
I find special interest in your comment as a specialist in Astronomy & the Solar System in anticipating more about the dynamics of the galaxies. I concur with your idea that the James Webb Telescope is "a powerful tool"!
Much obliged for your valuable contribution!
According to sciencefocus.com, the James Webb Space Telescope can see deeper into the Universe than its predecessor Hubble, opening up a new era of cosmology.
The James Webb Space Telescope can see deeper into the Universe than its predecessor Hubble, opening up a new era of cosmology.
The stunning collection of images and data from JWST, released just over six months since its launch, show us distant galaxies, the death of stars, and insights into how our Universe began.
Tuesday 12 July 2022 will be a date remembered by many.
The first image shared, called Webb’s First Deep Field, shows the SMACS 0723 galaxy cluster. The cluster in the image is as it was 4.6 billion years ago.
"JWST’s ability to peer back and glimpse the youngest galaxies ever spotted in the dawn of the Universe is exciting beyond words," said Matt Bothwell, astronomer at University of Cambridge. "It is the best tool the human race has ever built for learning about our cosmic origins — understanding where galaxies, stars, planets, and life come from.
"The telescope is quite literally a massive step forward in a quest, thousands of years old, to understand our place in the Universe. A step forward this big only happens a few times per century," said Bothwell.
Webb's Deep Field provides an insight into the early Universe, and the image itself will continue to reveal more information as scientists study the individual galaxies closer.
“Nothing beats the sheer exhilaration of looking at the Webb’s Deep Field and knowing that, in that pinprick of sky, are galaxies whose light has been travelling across space for most of the age of the Universe to reach us," said Marcus Chown, writer and former radio astronomer.
"[These are] galaxies that died long before the Sun and Earth were born, cannibalised in the multiple mergers that created the big galaxies which are a feature of the Universe today.” "Just as geologists drill down through the ground to see earlier epochs of the Earth, astronomers drill down through look-back time to see earlier epochs of the Universe. JWST is the ultimate time machine, taking us, hopefully, to the epoch when the first stars switched on, ending the cosmic dark age which began when the big bang fireball faded away."
The JWST images are beautiful, made even more so by an understanding of what they depict. They show just how spectacular the telescope, the technological marvel, is, says Pete Lawrence, astronomer and astrophotographer.
"I remember when Hubble’s refined images started to appear, revealing detail which felt like peeling off a layer of indistinction from what had been taken before," said Lawrence. "Now JWST has gone further and done it again."
"All of the first images are amazing, but the one that really stood out for me was NGC 3132, the Southern Ring. The level of detail and finesse in this image is frankly astonishing, especially when compared with what came before. Much of modern science is about analysing data, but the sheer visual beauty of this image also delivers clear insight into what is happening here."
The image of NGC 3132, also known as the Southern Ring Nebula, shows gas and dust being expelled by a dying star. These waves of molecules and particles create the wonderful colours of the nebula.
Most dying stars will end with a nebula such as this – even our own star, the Sun.
https://www.sciencefocus.com/
More on Webb and analysis of cluster dynamics. Webb's instruments support the creation of both luminosity and velocity distribution maps which in turn can be evaluated using N-Body analysis (where N is a very large number). Globular clusters provide a natural "laboratory" for such studies and Webb is an ideal instrument to perform such work.
Dear all ;
The images from the James Webb Space Telescope are extraordinary, with a depth and detail never before achieved by previous ground- and space-based observatories. The first results show a remarkable sensitivity. This makes it possible to observe either very distant objects such as primordial galaxies, or to better see objects closer to Earth but very faint, such as stars or planets in formation.
My regards
Thank you Dr. Doufnoune RACHIDA Rachida for your comment regarding the images provided by the JWST. It is worth mentioning also that false colors are used to make them aesthetically pleasing while showing information that is not normally visible to the naked eye. Scientists are mainly interested in the data collected by each filter of the telescope, at specific wavelengths for the images or via data from spectrographs. Important information is given about the temperatures, densities and chemical compositions of the observed objects.
Dear Ahmed T. Hussein,
One of the other great promises of James Webb is the exploration of the early ages of the Universe. Because the further away we look, the further back we can see. So by looking as far away as possible, we can see light as it was emitted billions of years ago. Astronomers have thus succeeded in going back 97% of the way to the big bang, which occurred 13.8 billion years ago. With James Webb, scientists will be able to learn more about the mass, age, history and composition of our solar system.
My regards
The more I see of the Webb data products the more I appreciate its power and versatility as an observing instrument. My interest is in the dynamics of complex structures such as globular clusters, clusters of galaxies and the formation of planetary disk systems. Webb is well suited for such studies and much more. Amazing machine!
Charles Ivie,
I'm sure many people in the world are holding their breath in anticipation of what Webb could be able to reveal!
Indeed, it is such a remarkable achievement!
James Webb Space Telescope discovers candidates for most distant galaxies yet
Astronomers have spotted what may be the two most distant galaxies ever seen hiding in early-release images from NASA's newest space telescope.
The James Webb Space Telescope's early science work includes a program called the Grism Lens-Amplified Survey from Space, or GLASS. Through GLASS, astronomers are scrutinizing the galaxy cluster Abell 2744, which is so massive that its gravity is able to distort the space around it and act as a gravitational lens to magnify the images of far more distant galaxies behind it.
Astronomers led by Rohan Naidu of the Harvard–Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics discovered the two candidate galaxies, called GLASS-z11 and GLASS-z13, in the first batch of data from GLASS. The galaxies' designations come from the fact that astronomers have measured their "redshifts" to be 11 and 13 respectively.
Redshift is a measure of how much a galaxy's light has been stretched by the expansion of the universe; the higher the redshift, the farther away (and the farther back in time) we see the source. The redshifts of 11 and 13 mean that we see these two galaxies as they existed over 13.4 billion years ago, just 400 and 300 million years after the Big Bang respectively.
The findings are not yet conclusive; the galaxies' redshifts have only been measured based on the color of their light using Webb's Near Infrared Camera (NIRCam). Confirming their redshifts will astronomers to analyze each galaxy's spectrum — the "barcode" that measures how much light of each wavelength is present — and determine how much light emitted by specific atoms and molecules has been redshifted.
Webb's Near Infrared Spectrograph (NIRSpec) instrument is already scheduled to conduct these studies. If that work confirms the apparent redshifts, then the two galaxies will be something of a surprise to astronomers. The area of sky surveyed by GLASS so far amounts to 50 square arcminutes (the full moon measures 31 arcminutes across), and yet in that area it has already discovered two galaxies with a redshift of 11 or greater.
That abundance would indicate that luminous galaxies in the very early universe are more common than expected. The detection also implies, Naidu's team wrote, that Webb will discover many more galaxies such as these, and perhaps even more distant ones, in its observations going forward.
Locating these luminous early galaxies is important because their fast formation suggests that they can be used to trace regions of galaxy formation in the early universe. And since galaxies form where the most matter is concentrated, mapping these early galaxies will also tell us about the distribution of normal and dark matter just a few hundred million years after the Big Bang.
Another surprising discovery is that GLASS-z11 shows indications that it is elongated, with a burgeoning spiral disk. The current confirmed most-distant galaxy, GN-z11, also appears to sport a disk. While most galaxies discovered at high redshift usually appear clumpy, GLASS-z11 and GN-z11 show that it was possible for galactic structure to develop quite quickly.
GLASS-z11 and GLASS-z13 are modest galaxies in comparison to our Milky Way galaxy, which is about 100,000 light-years across and contains approximately 200 billion stars. GLASS-z11 and GLASS-z13 are, however, large for their time, with diameters of between 3,000 and 4,500 light-years, and containing stars with total mass equivalent to on the order of a billion suns, many of them highly luminous.
According to our theories of galaxy formation, in the time that has passed since the images we see of them, both GLASS-z11 and GLASS-z13 will have grown substantially through mergers with other galaxies, and perhaps developed into giant elliptical galaxies. Meanwhile, cosmic expansion has carried GLASS-z11 and GLASS-z13 farther away from us, and today they are over 32 billion light-years away from us — far beyond where any telescope can reach.
https://www.space.com/james-webb-space-telescope-most-distant-galaxy
One open question is the nature of the first star. What is the oldest star one can observe? What were the masses of the primordial stars supposed to be formed after the period of the "dark age", about 200 million years after Big Bang, better to say after the first glow? Together with my Ph.D. student, we adopted the Lamda CDM model to describe the formation of the early stars. Very difficult issue.
If the first stars would be very massive they undergo pair creation supernovae or end up as black holes.
Prof Dr Ahmed T. Hussein
Thank you for the question and responses above; I have learnt a lot about a subject that I don't know much about.
When I put our rubbish out at night at around 8-9pm, looking south, there is a very bright star. I always forget to ask my husband what it is.
There's so much still to learn!
- Badges
- Science method