James Webb Space Telescope (JWST)

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NASA’s Webb Catches Fiery Hourglass as New Star Forms

Nov 16, 2022

NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has revealed the once-hidden features of the protostar within the dark cloud L1527, providing insight into the beginnings of a new star. These blazing clouds within the Taurus star-forming region are only visible in infrared light, making it an ideal target for Webb’s Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam).

The protostar itself is hidden from view within the “neck” of this hourglass shape. An edge-on protoplanetary disk is seen as a dark line across the middle of the neck. Light from the protostar leaks above and below this disk, illuminating cavities within the surrounding gas and dust.

https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/20 ... star-forms

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^^^More on that:

Webb Telescope Captures New Star Forming in Hourglass-Shaped Dust Clouds
by Dave Byrnes
November 16, 2022

Introduction:

(Courthouse News) — NASA on Wednesday released an image of a bright star-forming region in the Taurus constellation, captured by the infrared cameras of the James Webb Space Telescope.

At the center of the photo is a hot concentration of gas and dust known as a protostar. Protostars occur in nebulae when gravity pulls enough material together to form a rough sphere. The accretion of gas and dust attracts even more matter, slowly building mass and thermal energy. If the protostar becomes dense and hot enough – about 17.9 million degrees Fahrenheit – hydrogen fusion will begin in its core and new star will be born.

The protostar at the center of the Taurus star-forming region, known as L1527, is far from that milestone. It can take millions of years for hydrogen fusion to spark in the core of a newborn star, and NASA estimates that L1527 is only about 100,000 years old.

"L1527 is considered a class 0 protostar, the earliest stage of star formation," NASA stated in a press release accompanying the image. "Protostars like these, which are still cocooned in a dark cloud of dust and gas, have a long way to go before they become full-fledged stars."

L1527 is not even fully spherical yet, NASA said, noting it is more akin to a "small, hot, and puffy clump of gas" only about 20% to 40% the mass of our sun. But the protostar itself is only part of the image. The rest is dominated by flame-colored regions that stretch above and below the bright epicenter in an hourglass shape.

Read more here: https://www.courthousenews.com/webb-te ... t-clouds/

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James Webb Space Telescope reveals an exoplanet atmosphere as never seen before
https://phys.org/news/2022-11-james-web ... veals.html
by Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has just scored another first: a detailed molecular and chemical portrait of a distant world's skies.

The telescope's array of highly sensitive instruments was trained on the atmosphere of a "hot Saturn"—a planet about as massive as Saturn orbiting a star some 700 light-years away—known as WASP-39 b. While JWST and other space telescopes, including Hubble and Spitzer, have previously revealed isolated ingredients of this broiling planet's atmosphere, the new readings provide a full menu of atoms, molecules, and even signs of active chemistry and clouds.

"The clarity of the signals from a number of different molecules in the data is remarkable," says Mercedes López-Morales, an astronomer at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian and one of the scientists who contributed to the new results.

"We had predicted that we were going to see many of those signals, but still, when I first saw the data, I was in awe," López-Morales adds.

The latest data also give a hint of how these clouds in exoplanets might look up close: broken up rather than a single, uniform blanket over the planet.

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James Webb telescope produces an unparalleled view of the ghostly light in galaxy clusters
https://phys.org/news/2022-12-james-web ... -view.html
by Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias

In clusters of galaxies there is a fraction of stars which wander off into intergalactic space because they are pulled out by huge tidal forces generated between the galaxies in the cluster. The light emitted by these stars is called the intracluster light (ICL) and is extremely faint. Its brightness is less than 1% of the brightness of the darkest sky we can observe from Earth. This is one reason why images taken from space are very valueable for analyzing it.

Infrared wavelengths allow us to explore clusters of galaxies in a different way than with visible light. Thanks to its efficiency at infrared wavelengths and the sharpness of the images of the JWST, IAC researchers Mireia Montes and Ignacio Trujillo have been able to explore the intracluster light from SMACS-J0723.3-7327 with an unprecedented level of detail. In fact the images from the JWST of the center of this cluster are twice as deep as the previous images obtained by the Hubble Space Telescope.

"In this study we show the great potential of JWST for observing an object which is so faint," explains Mireia Montes, the first author of the article. "This will let us study galaxy clusters which are much further away, and in much greater detail," she adds.

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New Webb Image Reveals Dusty Disk Like Never Seen Before

Jan 11, 2023

NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has imaged the inner workings of a dusty disk surrounding a nearby red dwarf star. These observations represent the first time the previously known disk has been imaged at these infrared wavelengths of light. They also provide clues to the composition of the disk.

The star system in question, AU Microscopii or AU Mic, is located 32 light-years away in the southern constellation Microscopium. It’s approximately 23 million years old, meaning that planet formation has ended since that process typically takes less than 10 million years. The star has two known planets, discovered by other telescopes. The dusty debris disk that remains is the result of collisions between leftover planetesimals – a more massive equivalent of the dust in our solar system that creates a phenomenon known as zodiacal light.

“A debris disk is continuously replenished by collisions of planetesimals. By studying it, we get a unique window into the recent dynamical history of this system,” said Kellen Lawson of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, lead author on the study and a member of the research team that studied AU Mic.

“This system is one of the very few examples of a young star, with known exoplanets, and a debris disk that is near enough and bright enough to study holistically using Webb’s uniquely powerful instruments,” said Josh Schlieder of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, principal investigator for the observing program and a study co-author.

The team used Webb’s Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam) to study AU Mic. With the help of NIRCam's coronagraph, which blocks the intense light of the central star, they were able to study the region very close to the star. The NIRCam images allowed the researchers to trace the disk as close to the star as 5 astronomical units (460 million miles) – the equivalent of Jupiter’s orbit in our solar system.

https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/20 ... een-before



Credits: NASA, ESA, CSA, and K. Lawson (Goddard Space Flight Center). Image processing: A. Pagan (STScI)

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Webb Spies Chariklo Ring System With High-Precision Technique

January 25, 2023

In an observational feat of high precision, scientists used a new technique with NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope to capture the shadows of starlight cast by the thin rings of Chariklo. Chariklo is an icy, small body, but the largest of the known Centaur population, located more than 2 billion miles away beyond the orbit of Saturn. Chariklo is only 160 miles (250 kilometers) or ~51 times smaller than Earth in diameter, and its rings orbit at a distance of about 250 miles (400 kilometers) from the center of the body.

https://blogs.nasa.gov/webb/2023/01/25/ ... technique/

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James Webb telescope detects evidence of ancient 'universe breaker' galaxies
Source: The Guardian

The James Webb space telescope has detected what appear to be six massive ancient galaxies, which astronomers are calling “universe breakers” because their existence could upend current theories of cosmology.

The objects date to a time when the universe was just 3% of its current age and are far larger than was presumed possible for galaxies so early after the big bang. If confirmed, the findings would call into question scientists’ understanding of how the earliest galaxies formed.

“These objects are way more massive​ than anyone expected,” said Joel Leja, an assistant professor of astronomy and astrophysics at Penn State University and a study co-author. “We expected only to find tiny, young, baby galaxies at this point in time, but we’ve discovered galaxies as mature as our own in what was previously understood to be the dawn of the universe.”

The observations come from the first dataset released from Nasa’s James Webb space telescope, which is equipped with infrared-sensing instruments capable of detecting light emitted by the most ancient stars and galaxies. While sifting through images, Dr Erica Nelson, of the University of Colorado Boulder, and a co-author, spotted a series of “fuzzy dots” that appeared unusually bright and unusually red.

Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/science/202 ... t-galaxies

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James Webb telescope detects evidence of ancient 'universe breaker' galaxies
Source: The Guardian

[...]

Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/science/202 ... t-galaxies

Incredible.

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New Webb Telescope Image Reveals a Supernova Remnant in Stunning Detail
Kiona Smith
April 10 , 2023

Introduction:

(Inverse) Dusty debris from the destructive death of a giant star glows fiery orange and red as it collides with interstellar dust.

NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) recently captured this stunningly detailed image of Cassiopeia A, the remnants of a giant star’s cataclysmic death throes. It’s the most recent supernova in our galaxy, and astronomers have studied it extensively, hoping to reconstruct something the life and death of a giant star from the debris of its final explosion. JWST’s latest image of the cosmic debris cloud, taken with the Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI), may shed some light on how the explosive demise of giant stars helps scatter the ingredients for life throughout the galaxy.

A DUSTY DILEMMA

There used to be a massive star 11,000 light years away, toward the constellation Cassiopeia, but about 340 years ago it vanished in a brilliant burst of light. The giant star had burned up the last of its fuel, and without the pressure of nuclear fusion to counter the star’s crushing weight, its outer layers collapsed inward in an instant. That collapse triggered a tremendous explosion, one of the largest and most powerful in the universe, that blasted the former contents of the star outward into space.

Today, the slowly spreading cloud of gas and dust that used to be a star is about ten light years wide, and its outer edge is pushing into the shell of cooler gas and dust that once surrounded the star system. The heat from that collision shows up as ripples of orange and red in the false-color version of this MIRI image (part of image processing involved translating infrared wavelengths into colors our eyes can actually see).

Astronomers hope the new JWST data, along with years of other observations in every possible wavelength of light, will hold some clues about how galaxies like ours get their stockpile of dust and heavy elements. That material is essential for forming planets –—and life. And all of it was once part of the guts of massive stars that died in fiery explosions like Cassiopeia A.

Read more here: https://www.inverse.com/science/look-n ... us-detail


The clumpy pink strands of matter closer to the center of the supernova remnant are clouds of heavy elements, like oxygen.
ESA/JWS

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Researchers discover tiny galaxy with big star power using James Webb telescope

04/13/2023

Using first-of-their-kind observations from the James Webb Space Telescope, a University of Minnesota Twin Cities-led team looked more than 13 billion years into the past to discover a unique, minuscule galaxy that generated new stars at an extremely high rate for its size. The galaxy is one of the smallest ever discovered at this distance—around 500 million years after the Big Bang—and could help astronomers learn more about galaxies that were present shortly after the Universe came into existence.

The paper is published in Science, one of the world's top peer-reviewed academic journals.

The University of Minnesota researchers were one of the first teams to study a distant galaxy using the James Webb Space Telescope, and their findings will be among the first ever published.

“This galaxy is far beyond the reach of all telescopes except the James Webb, and these first-of-their-kind observations of the distant galaxy are spectacular,” said Patrick Kelly, senior author of the paper and an assistant professor in the University of Minnesota School of Physics and Astronomy. “Here, we’re able to see most of the way back to the Big Bang, and we've never looked at galaxies when the universe was this young in this level of detail. The galaxy’s volume is roughly a millionth of the Milky Way’s, but we can see that it’s still forming the same numbers of stars each year.”

https://cse.umn.edu/college/news/resear ... -telescope

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Asteroid belts imaged by James Webb Space Telescope

9th May 2023

The first infrared image of asteroids outside our Solar System has been captured by the James Webb Space Telescope. Three distinct rings of debris are shown to exist around Fomalhaut, a young star 25 light years away.

Read more: https://www.futuretimeline.net/blog/202 ... escope.htm

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James Webb's 'too massive' galaxies may be even more massive
https://phys.org/news/2023-05-james-web ... axies.html
by Niels Bohr Institute

The first results from the James Webb Space Telescope have hinted at galaxies so early and so massive that they are in tension with our understanding of the formation of structure in the universe. Various explanations have been proposed that may alleviate this tension. But now a new study from the Cosmic Dawn Center suggests an effect which has never before been studied at such early epochs, indicating that the galaxies may be even more massive.

If you have been following the first results from the James Webb Space Telescope, you have probably heard about the paramount issue with the observations of the earliest galaxies: They are too big.

From a few days after the release of the first images, and repeatedly through the coming months, new reports of ever-more distant galaxies appeared. Disturbingly, several of the galaxies seemed to be "too massive."

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JWST Images of Early Galaxies Intrigue Astronomers
by AAS Nova
May 26 , 2023

Introduction:

(Sky & Telescope) JWST has given us a new look at galaxies as they were in the first few billion years of the universe. Among the newly discovered galaxies is a population of flat, red, extended disks that may have been entirely missed by previous surveys.

DUSTY GALAXIES IN THE DISTANT UNIVERSE

To understand how today’s galaxies came to be as they are, we need to study galaxies in the distant past. Among the galaxies we know to have existed at redshift (z) greater than 2 — up to when the universe was a little more than 3 billion years old — are massive, dusty galaxies forming stars at a furious rate.

To study the structure and evolution of these galaxies, we need a telescope that can resolve fine details and is sensitive to dust-reddened photons. The Hubble Space Telescope has the resolving power but doesn’t span the necessary wavelength range. The Spitzer Space Telescope could see the sought-after infrared wavelengths but lacked the ability to pick out the fine details. JWST marries these two requirements, opening a window onto the “Hubble-dark” universe of dusty galaxies.

Nelson and collaborators noticed that the new JWST images contained galaxies that were absent in the Hubble images of the same region. By selecting for galaxies with certain color characteristics, the team picked out 26 galaxies that were bright in the JWST images but missing in the Hubble images. Among these newfound galaxies are a dozen that are remarkably extended rather than compact — a potentially unexplored population of galaxies present 1–3 billion years after the Big Bang.

Read more here: https://skyandtelescope.org/astronomy- ... niverse/

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Webb Space Telescope detects universe's most distant complex organic molecules
https://phys.org/news/2023-06-webb-spac ... stant.html
by Lois Yoksoulian, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Researchers have detected complex organic molecules in a galaxy more than 12 billion light-years away from Earth—the most distant galaxy in which these molecules are now known to exist. Thanks to the capabilities of the recently launched James Webb Space Telescope and careful analyses from the research team, a new study lends critical insight into the complex chemical interactions that occur in the first galaxies in the early universe.

University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign astronomy and physics professor Joaquin Vieira and graduate student Kedar Phadke collaborated with researchers at Texas A&M University and an international team of scientists to differentiate between infrared signals generated by some of the more massive and larger dust grains in the galaxy and those of the newly observed hydrocarbon molecules.

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James Webb Space Telescope reveals how galaxies made the early universe transparent
By Stefanie Waldek published about 3 hours ago
Once upon a time, the cosmos was opaque.

james webb space telescope image of dozens of galaxies in deep space

By analyzing new observations from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, a team led by Simon Lilly of ETH Zürich in Switzerland found evidence that galaxies that existed 900 million years after the Big Bang ionized the gas around them, causing it to become transparent. (Image credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, Simon Lilly (ETH Zürich), Daichi Kashino (Nagoya University), Jorryt Matthee (ETH Zürich), Christina Eilers (MIT), Rob Simcoe (MIT), Rongmon Bordoloi (NCSU), Ruari Mackenzie (ETH Zürich); Image Processing: Alyssa Pagan (STScI) Ruari Macken)


Shortly after the Big Bang, the universe was a dark and mysterious place.

And I mean really dark — the gas between stars and galaxies was opaque, so no light could shine through. As anyone who's ever looked through a telescope knows, that's no longer the case, since we can see celestial objects all throughout the universe from our vantage point here on Earth. But what caused the change in opacity?

Using observations from NASA's James Webb Space Telescope, an international team of astronomers led by Simon Lilly of ETH Zürich in Switzerland has an answer. The team looked back in time at galaxies from the end of the Era of Reionization, a dramatic period in the universe's history in which gas was heated, cooled and then reionized (given an electrical charge once again).



More than 13 billion years ago, during the Era of Reionization, the universe was a very different place. The gas between galaxies was largely opaque to energetic light, making it difficult to observe young galaxies. What allowed the universe to become completely ionized, leading to the "clear" conditions detected in much of the universe today? Researchers using NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope found that galaxies are overwhelmingly responsible. (Image credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, Joyce Kang (STScI))


Looking at those early galaxies, which existed just 900 million years after the Big Bang, the team saw that most of the gas in the universe was somewhere between opaque and transparent. But directly around the galaxies, everything was clear.

More:
https://www.space.com/early-galaxies-tr ... -telescope