Happy Birthday James Webb. In One Year it has taken us back in time 13.4 billion years…..

07/16/2023 Rachel Kennedy Science, Space 13 Comments

“One of the great things about Webb is every time we see a new result we’re all just sitting around the monitors going ‘Wow.’ I mean, it’s really an amazing mission for me when I think about the fact that it can just get people you know, completely engaged every time you see a new result. You never get jaded,” said NASA’s Astrophysics Director Mark Clampin.

An artist’s impression of the James Webb Space Telescope. 
NASA

From Business Insider: Below are just six of the game changing discoveries brought to us by the JWST this year. . .

  1. The birth of 50 distant stars. Some of them are suns powering planetary discs that could one day form a solar system, light years from our own.
    The first anniversary image from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope displays star birth like it’s never been seen before, full of detailed, impressionistic texture. The subject is the Rho Ophiuchi cloud complex, the closest star-forming region to Earth. It is a relatively small, quiet stellar nursery, but you’d never know it from Webb’s chaotic close-up. Jets bursting from young stars crisscross the image, impacting the surrounding interstellar gas and lighting up molecular hydrogen, shown in red. Some stars display the telltale shadow of a circumstellar disk, the makings of future planetary systems

    2. A supermassive black hole with the mass of 9 million suns that predates any scientists had ever discovered. It’s so large and old that scientists grappled with a way to explain it.

    An artists rendering of a large black hole and the cosmic dust surrounding it. 
    NASA Goddard
    Also an artist’s rendering…….

    3. In a distant ring of rock, dust, and gas, scientists discovered a chemical called methyl cation for the first time. It’s known as a molecular building block of life, and makes up most of the organic material on our planet.


    Images from the James Webb Space Telescope show a part of the Orion Nebula where methyl cation was detected in a young star system, shown in the lower right segment. 
    ESA/Webb, NASA, CSA, M. Zamani (ESA/Webb), PDRs4ALL ERS Team

    4. The discovery of hundreds of new galaxies, many of which are from the very early universe.

    James Webb Space Telescope image showing 45,000 galaxies as small splashes of light against the black void of deep space. 
    NASA, ESA, CSA, Brant Robertson (UC Santa Cruz), Ben Johnson (CfA), Sandro Tacchella (Cambridge), Marcia Rieke (University of Arizona), Daniel Eisenstein (CfA

    5. Sand storms on a planet 235 trillion miles away. Scientists call the countless amounts of little sand particles a “treasure chest” for scientific discovery.

    line graph showing emission spectrum of a distant planet showing signatures of silicate clouds water methane and carbon monoxide
    The spectrum Webb found on the planet VHS 1256 b, showing signatures of silicate clouds, water, methane, and carbon monoxide. 
    NASA, ESA, CSA, J. Olmsted (STScI); Science: Brittany Miles (University of Arizona), Sasha Hinkley (University of Exeter), Beth Biller (University of Edinburgh), Andrew Skemer (University of California, Santa Cruz)

    6. A new view of the pillars of creation shows in detail how star-speckled the dusty region is. Hubble had taken photos of this star-forming region before, which makes for an astonishing side-by-side view of scientific progress.

    Hubble’s 2014 image of the Pillars of Creation (left), versus Webb’s 2022 snapshot of the same formation (right). 
    NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI; Joseph DePasquale (STScI), Anton M. Koekemoer (STScI), Alyssa Pagan (STScI)ok

    Space

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