“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.
From Business Insider: Below are just six of the game changing discoveries brought to us by the JWST this year. . .
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.
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.
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.
4. The discovery of hundreds of new galaxies, many of which are from the very early universe.
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.
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.
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