James Webb Space Telescope (JWST)

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James Webb Space Telescope captures stunning image of Neptune's rings and moons
By Robert Lea
https://www.space.com/james-webb-space- ... socialflow
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The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has captured its first image of the solar system ice giant Neptune, revealing the planet in a whole new light.

The image gives astronomers their best look at Neptune's icy rings for 32 years, since the Voyager 2 spacecraft flew past the planet on its way out of the solar system. "It has been three decades since we last saw those faint, dusty bands, and this is the first time we've seen them in the infrared," Heidi Hammel, a planetary scientist at Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy (AURA), said in a statement (opens in new tab).

Excitingly, in addition to the previously known bright, narrow Neptunian rings, the new James Webb Space Telescope image also shows some fainter dust rings around Neptune that even Voyager 2's up-close-and-personal visit to the planet in 1989 couldn't reveal — rings that scientists have never seen before.
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Re: James Webb Space Telescope (JWST)

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weatheriscool wrote: Fri Sep 23, 2022 7:29 pm James Webb Space Telescope captures stunning image of Neptune's rings and moons
By Robert Lea
https://www.space.com/james-webb-space- ... socialflow
Image
The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has captured its first image of the solar system ice giant Neptune, revealing the planet in a whole new light.

The image gives astronomers their best look at Neptune's icy rings for 32 years, since the Voyager 2 spacecraft flew past the planet on its way out of the solar system. "It has been three decades since we last saw those faint, dusty bands, and this is the first time we've seen them in the infrared," Heidi Hammel, a planetary scientist at Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy (AURA), said in a statement (opens in new tab).

Excitingly, in addition to the previously known bright, narrow Neptunian rings, the new James Webb Space Telescope image also shows some fainter dust rings around Neptune that even Voyager 2's up-close-and-personal visit to the planet in 1989 couldn't reveal — rings that scientists have never seen before.
All these planets just within our own solar system that are starting to show they have their own rings giving them the Saturn eye in the sky look makes me think something major happened to all these planets including Earth to be so perfect. Hell our own moon being perfect is a question of its own. Hopefully one day some sort of meaning is gathered after exploring a good amount of the galaxy.
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Re: James Webb Space Telescope (JWST)

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How the James Webb Space Telescope Will Power the Search for Aliens
by Kiona Smith
October 15, 2022

Introduction:
(Inverse) ALONG WITH revealing the oldest galaxies in the universe and shedding light on the birth of stars, the James Webb Space Telescope will help us seek out life on other worlds — if it exists. We talked to the experts about how the telescope will aid the search for habitable planets and whether it could spot something like a Dyson sphere, and where we should look.

HOW WILL THE WEBB SPACE TELESCOPE LOOK FOR ALIENS?

If aliens exist, they need a place to live, so astronomers’ first goal with Webb will be to find exoplanets that are located in Earth-like temperatures where liquid water is likely to be stable.

But an address in the habitable zone doesn’t guarantee a livable planet — for instance, Venus, Earth, and Mars are all in the Sun’s habitable zone.

“Every rocky body in our own Solar System seems to have a different atmospheric composition,” Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory astronomer Kevin Stevenson, whose team will use Webb to study nine exoplanets starting in July 2023, tells Inverse. "When you look at the four rocky planets in our own solar system, Venus has a very thick carbon dioxide atmosphere, Earth has a nitrogen-dominated atmosphere with oxygen, Mercury has a very thin nitrogen atmosphere, and then Mars has a thin carbon dioxide atmosphere.”
Read more here: https://www.inverse.com/science/how-th ... or-aliens
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NASA’s Webb Takes Star-filled Portrait of Pillars of Creation
October 19, 2022

Introduction:
(EurekAlert) NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has captured a lush, highly detailed landscape – the iconic Pillars of Creation – where new stars are forming within dense clouds of gas and dust. The three-dimensional pillars look like majestic rock formations, but are far more permeable. These columns are made up of cool interstellar gas and dust that appear – at times – semi-transparent in near-infrared light.

Webb’s new view of the Pillars of Creation, which were first made famous when imaged by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope in 1995, will help researchers revamp their models of star formation by identifying far more precise counts of newly formed stars, along with the quantities of gas and dust in the region. Over time, they will begin to build a clearer understanding of how stars form and burst out of these dusty clouds over millions of years.
Newly formed stars are the scene-stealers in this image from Webb’s Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam). These are the bright red orbs that typically have diffraction spikes and lie outside one of the dusty pillars. When knots with sufficient mass form within the pillars of gas and dust, they begin to collapse under their own gravity, slowly heat up, and eventually form new stars.

What about those wavy lines that look like lava at the edges of some pillars? These are ejections from stars that are still forming within the gas and dust. Young stars periodically shoot out supersonic jets that collide with clouds of material, like these thick pillars. This sometimes also results in bow shocks, which can form wavy patterns like a boat does as it moves through water. The crimson glow comes from the energetic hydrogen molecules that result from jets and shocks. This is evident in the second and third pillars from the top – the NIRCam image is practically pulsing with their activity. These young stars are estimated to be only a few hundred thousand years old.

Although it may appear that near-infrared light has allowed Webb to “pierce through” the clouds to reveal great cosmic distances beyond the pillars, there are no galaxies in this view. Instead, a mix of translucent gas and dust known as the interstellar medium in the densest part of our Milky Way galaxy’s disk blocks our view of the deeper universe.
Read more here: https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/968488


Image
The Pillars of Creation are set off in a kaleidoscope of color in NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope’s near-infrared-light view.
Credits: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI; Joseph DePasquale (STScI), Anton M. Koekemoer (STScI), Alyssa Pagan (STScI).
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Re: James Webb Space Telescope (JWST)

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The james webb telescope fucking rules!!! how awesome. What I am waiting for is if it can find a planet with oceans and give us a picture of it. ;) But that certainly ranks up there.
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JWST Spots Multiple Galaxies Merging Around "Monster" Black Hole
by Ben Taub
October 21, 2022

Introduction:
(IFL Science)Three ancient galaxies have been caught in the act of merging around a so-called “extremely red quasar”, providing fascinating new insights into how modern galaxy clusters may have formed. The event – which was spotted by NASA’s JWST – occurred some 11.5 billion years ago in what may have been one of the densest areas of galaxy formation in the early universe.

Extremely red quasars are a rare and highly luminous type of active galactic nucleus that are not found anywhere in our cosmic neighborhood. They occur when black holes at the center of massive galaxies devour matter from a surrounding accretion disk, resulting in an incredibly powerful outflow of ionized gas.

The quasar in question was originally identified by the Hubble Space Telescope, which highlighted some of its outflows and led to speculation that it may have existed at the heart of a galaxy merger. “With previous images we thought we saw hints that the galaxy was possibly interacting with other galaxies on the path to merger because their shapes get distorted in the process and we thought we maybe saw that,” explained Nadia L. Zakamska, author of a soon-to-be-published study on the quasar, in a statement.

However, after re-examining the cosmic beast using JWST’s Near Infrared Spectrograph (NIRSpec), astronomers were stunned to discover at least three separate galaxies swirling around the quasar. By mapping the movement of colossal amounts of material contained within this busy pocket of the early universe, researchers were able to conclude that the quasar was indeed at the center of a dense knot of galaxy formation.

Circling the quasar at a distance of around 39,000 lightyears, the three companion galaxies are moving at incredibly high speeds, indicating that an enormous amount of mass is present within the cluster. Exactly where all this mass originates, however, is something of a mystery.
Read more here: https://www.iflscience.com/jwst-spots- ... ago-65869
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Galaxies Collide in Stunning Webb Telescope Image
by Kiona Smith
October 27, 2022

Introduction:
(Inverse) IN THE JAMES Webb Space Telescope’s newest image, a pair of galaxies are smashing together, triggering waves of new star formation. And in the bright heart of the collision, we may be witnessing the birth of a new supermassive black hole.

Around 270 million light years away, it’s hard to tell where one galaxy ends and the other begins. The merging galaxies of IC 1623 have very nearly become one object already. It’s a tale as old as time — two galaxies, caught up in each other’s gravitational pull, spiral closer and closer together, falling toward a common center of gravity until, at last, they merge into a single larger galaxy.

Most of the large, intricately-structured spiral galaxies in the nearby universe probably evolved this way, from generations of smaller galaxies colliding and merging to former ever-larger, more complex ones.

We tend to think of galaxies as being made of stars — billions of them arranged in huge, swirling disks with bright, dense cores and spiral arms. But much of the stuff that makes up a galaxy is just gas and dust — gargantuan clumps, filaments, and bands of it in the space between the stars. Webb is especially good at seeing things like that interstellar dust: relatively cool and dark, glowing in the infrared wavelengths only thanks to its own heat.

When two galaxies merge, those huge clouds of interstellar gas and dust get shoved together, which creates areas of denser, hotter material. And in the densest patches of gas, the sudden pileup of more material is enough to cause some especially massive clumps to collapse under their own weight, flaring to life as new stars. These waves of new star formation show up in this latest Webb image as bright gold bubbles amid the red background of heated gas. Some of those bright patches, compressed by the galactic collision, are churning out new stars at roughly 20 times the rate of our own galaxy.
Read more here: https://www.inverse.com/science/galaxi ... ope-image

Image
Three of Webb’s instruments — the Mid InfraRed Instrument, the Near Infrared Spectrometer, and the Near Infrared Camera — produced this breathtaking image of the merging galaxy pair called IC 1623.
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JWST's New Image of The Pillars of Creation Is A Halloween Masterpiece
by Dr Alfredo Carpineti, PhD.
October 28, 2022

Introduction:
(IFL Science) The Pillars of Creations have always brought awe and amazement to both astronomers and the general public. These light-years-long structures are the birthplace of many new stars and they always look incredible. JWST's recent image in near-infrared is not just beautiful but allows us to peel back some of the dust layers to see the many stars in the region just beyond. But in this newly released image (see below) in mid-infrared, the cooler gas is the centerpiece, making this structure look ghostly, just in time for Halloween.

The difference between this image and the previous JWST portrait of the Pillars is stark. The NIRCam (near-infrared) image is full of stars while this new one by the MIRI cam (mid-infrared instrument) is almost heavy with the lack of. The stars seen are the youngest in this field. They are the ones still surrounded by thick layers of gas. The blue stars on the scene are the opposite. They are older stars that have shed their outer layers.

The darkest shades of gray are the densest part of the gas clouds, and the red background is the interstellar gas of the Milky Way, which is not dense enough to block all light but dense enough to make distant galaxies disappear.

The Pillars of Creation are located within the Eagle Nebula, a large gas cloud in the Milky Way that is 6,500 light-years from Earth.
Read more here: https://www.iflscience.com/jwst-s-new- ... ece-65977


Image
Portion of the Pillars of Creation from JWST's MIRI.
Image Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI; J. DePasquale (STScI), A. Pagan (STScI), A. Koekemoer (STScI)
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UCI-led Astronomers Capitalize on Early Access to James Webb Space Telescope Data


Introduction:
(EurekAlert) Irvine, Calif., Nov. 14, 2022 – First in line to receive data transmissions from the James Webb Space Telescope, a team of astronomers at the University of California, Irvine and other institutions is using the unprecedentedly clear observations to reveal the secret inner workings of galaxies.

In a paper published today in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, the researchers describe their examination of the nearby galaxy NGC 7469 with the JWST’s ultrasensitive mid-infrared detection instruments. They conducted the most detailed analysis yet of the interactions between an active galactic nucleus dominated by a supermassive black hole and the star-forming galaxy regions surrounding it.

“What we are seeing in this system has been a surprise for us,” said lead author Vivian U, UCI assistant research scientist in physics and astronomy and member of one of 13 JWST Early Release Science teams. “Viewing this galaxy face-on, we are able to see not only winds from the supermassive black hole blowing in our direction but also ‘shock heating’ of the gas induced by said winds very close to the central active galactic nucleus, which is something we had not expected to be able to discern so clearly.”

U noted that shock heating happens when wind from a black hole in a galaxy’s center pushes on surrounding dense gas, creating a shock front that deposits energy into the interstellar medium. This effect could influence star formation in two opposing ways, she said. By compressing the gas into molecular form, it can foster the birth of new stars, or excessively strong feedback processes from the galactic wind can prevent birth by destroying stellar nurseries.

According to U, NGC 7469 is a Seyfert galaxy with an active center hosting a supermassive black hole and a ring of star-forming regions. For decades, astronomers have tried to study the detailed dynamics of these systems, which make up about 10 percent of all galaxies, but dust – commonly abundant at the center of them – has made that a challenge. The JWST gave U and her co-authors access to what lies behind the dust veil.
Read more here: https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/971252
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