What about if I say there are more than a billion galaxies? Right…. There are a billion or more
galaxies in the universe, some may be the same as our milky way galaxy in which we live today
or may be different. To find out the other galaxies in this vast stretching universe,
the NASA team launched its James Webb Space Telescope last year.
Today we will go around the vast galaxies in the universe. All we know about these
galaxies is because of NASA's most expensive space telescope. So, without letting down
your curiosity let's get started. In the following years, a big space
telescope was under construction, and after it was completed it was launched into space on 25
December 2021 to reach its destination point to find out about this vast universe. In July 2022,
the James Webb Space Telescope was finally at its destination point,
Lagrange point 2 (L2), which is nearly 1.6 million miles away from the Earth.
The largest and the most powerful space telescope ever launched is on its mission to study and take
images of the first stars and look further back into the history of the universe. The telescope
is doing its best and have found a couple of many galaxies back in the universe.
In just a couple of days after the mega-telescope started delivering data, the astronomers reported
unexpected exciting new discoveries about the galaxies, stars, exoplanets and even Jupiter.
In few days after its launch, the Webb published a public image in which a lot
of maybe more than a thousands of galaxies were seen in a very small area of the sky.
Some of them were magnified as their light bent around a central cluster of galaxies.
With the goal of publishing the first JWST research report regarding the image,
the team got to work by examining the image. Pascale, an astrophysicist at the University
of California, Berkeley said, "We worked ceaselessly, it was like an escape room."
One of Webb's most special features is that it has the ability to look back into time and can see
the early universe and some of the first stars and galaxies. More reportedly, Webb has found the most
distant and the earliest galaxy ever known. With a very far distance that Webb observed,
300 million years after the Big Bang, a recently discovered galaxy called GLASS-z13 has taken
the title of earliest galaxy ever discovered. When two teams independently examined JWST images
for the GLASS survey, one of more than 200 science programmes planned for the telescope's first year
in space, they discovered the galaxy. Both teams, one led by Rohan Naidu at the
Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Massachusetts and the other by Marco Castellano
at the Astronomical Observatory of Rome, found two particularly distant galaxies in
the data. One that Webb detects the light it emitted 400 million years after the Big Bang,
tying the galaxy seen by the Hubble Space Telescope as the oldest ever, and the other,
dubbed GLASS-z13, seen as it appeared. Both the found galaxies look extremely small.
If we compare them with our Milky Way, both are more than a 100 times smaller.
The earliest galaxies show a surprising formation rate of stars, containing around
1 billion times the mass of our Sun which is very much for the galaxies that young.
After a few weeks into the survey, the team has found a large number of galaxies from the
universe’s first 500 million years, but Larson and their colleagues haven't released their exact
findings till now. “It’s better than I imagined and it’s only the beginning,” she said.
A wide number of early galaxies were hidden in the cluster image of the galaxies called, SMACS 0723.
One distant galaxy in the image, a speck of light that appeared 700 million years after the Big
Bang, was examined more closely by the telescope. Webb's spectrograph found heavy elements in the
galaxy, including oxygen. Now scientists are hoping the telescope will find an absence
of heavy elements in even earlier galaxies. “We’re looking for galaxies where we see no heavy
elements,” said Andy Bunker, an astrophysicist at the University of Oxford. “That might be
a smoking gun for the first generation of stars formed from primordial hydrogen and
helium. Theoretically they should exist. It depends whether they’re bright enough.”
After discovering many of these amazing galaxies, the furthest star,
named Earendel after a figure in J.R.R. Tolkien's "Lord of the Rings" prequel "The Silmarillion,"
caught Webb's attention next. A deep field photograph from the Hubble Space Telescope
has improved visibility of the star's light, which took nearly 12.9 billion years to reach Earth.
In addition, Webb discovered the Cartwheel, a wheel-shaped galaxy with unparalleled structural
detail. Webb discovered individual stars within the galaxy's star-forming regions
as well as discovered more young star clusters encircling the galaxy's supermassive black hole
using infrared radiation. Infrared light, which can see through that dust, can best see these
zones because they are densely covered in it. The scientist's trouble for understanding the
structures of galaxies and the formation of stars within them is now put to end
with impactful data provided by Webb. On behalf of Lee's team, Webb studied the
young star-forming regions of NGC 7496, a galaxy 24 million light-years away that has been hidden
from view until now. Webb, however, is able to observe infrared light that scatters off dust,
which enables the telescope to probe closely to the times when stars first began to burn
nuclear fusion in their cores. “The dust is actually lighting up,” said Lee.
The fact that NGC 7496 is a typical galaxy and "not a poster-child galaxy" is what she found
most amazing. It suddenly comes to life, though, and displays channels where stars
are developing when Webb is watching over it. She said, "It's really wonderful."
Taking a look within our galaxy, Webb's attention is more towards our exoplanet, Jupiter.
The telescope is expected to reveal hot Jupiter exoplanet atmospheres with molten rain,
which hurls vaporized rock or crystals from great heights.
"On Earth, a lot of these minerals are jewels," Tiffany Kataria,
who is an exoplanetary scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said. "A geologist would
study them as rocks on Earth, but they can form clouds on exoplanets. That's pretty wild."
Imagining a planet with raining metals and minerals? Yeah,
that's Jupiter in our Solar System. NASA, on 14th July had published some of
the first images captured by the Webb of our Solar System. Jupiter along with its
moon and rings appeared in magnificent fashion as part of the first batch of images, captured
in an exposure lasting just 75 seconds. "I couldn't believe that we saw everything so
clearly, and how bright they were," Stefanie Milam, Webb's deputy project scientist for
planetary science based at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland,
said in a statement. "It's really exciting to think of the capability and opportunity
that we have for observing these kinds of objects in our solar system."
Astronomers are pretty sure that the upper atmosphere of Jupiter is thousands of degrees
hotter as compared to its lower temperature. With the help of Webb's 75 seconds exposure
to the planet, they could see the upper atmosphere of Jupiter shining burning red;
it appears as a red ring around the planet. “We have this layer a few hundred kilometers above
the cloud decks, and it’s glowing because it’s hot,” said Henrik Melin, a planetary scientist
at the University of Leicester. “We’ve never seen it like this before on a global scale.
That’s an extraordinary thing to see.” Webb's 75-second observation of Jupiter shows
the mysterious, burning red light of its upper atmosphere. The icy moon Europa, which shines
strongly on the left, and Jupiter's thin ring are also observed. The planet's bottom border has a
faint atmospheric disturbance that is brought on by a collision with the lava filled moon.
Taking hundreds of pics of different stars and galaxies, Webb has already
seen the renowned TRAPPIST-1 system, a red dwarf star with seven Earth-sized worlds,
some of which may be habitable. Webb is doing a great job and is taking
constant pictures of different galaxies and stars and helping the scientists to understand the
universe more easily. The universe is getting more interesting with the amazing information, images
and videos provided by the James Webb Space Telescope.You can also take a look into the
Untold data Information That Voyager has Sent Back To Earth, it is TERRIFYING .