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About 200 days ago, the James Webb Space Telescope launched from French Guiana.
This telescope was designed to do something very specific and very difficult…
detect infrared light at high resolution.
That’s very hard to do because anything that has any heat at all emits
infrared radiation, including the mirrors of telescopes.
And also, to detect the light it wanted to see at the resolution scientists desired,
its mirror needed to be huge.
And also, it needed a big sunshield to keep it cool.
All of that meant that this was a telescope that was far too big to fit inside of a rocket.
So we created a telescope that needed to delicately unfold,
transforming into its final form with over 300 different individual points of failure.
But this week, the very first full-color images from this telescope
were released and I want to talk to you about them.
Now, I’m getting over COVID right now,
so I couldn’t come into the studio to record, but you know I wasn’t gonna miss this.
We’re going to go through the first four of JWST’s full-color images,
from closest to most distant, and we’ll show you both the most detailed view
we had before this week, and the view that Webb has given us.
Now, it’s important to remember that all of these images are very different
distances away from us, which has made this release a kind of tour of our universe.
Beginning with The Southern Ring, a nebula a mere 2000 light-years away,
here in our home galaxy.
This is a planetary nebula, which is 100% the wrong term for these objects.
They have nothing to do with planets…but, because they tend to be round,
they looked like planets to early astronomers and the name stuck.
They are, in fact, clouds of gas and dust that has been thrown off of red giants as
they enter the end of their lives.
You can actually see the different shells of gas that were thrown off
of the red giant in this image.
This one comes from the Near Infrared Camera, or NIRCam,
which looks at the shortest infrared wavelengths.
There is a lot of different infrared light and astronomers
generally classify it as near, mid, and far.
And, in fact, Webb’s first four images are actually seven images
because three of the first targets were imaged with two different devices.
The NIRCam, which images wavelengths a bit longer
than what we can see with our eyes, and the Mid-Infrared Instrument,
or MIRI which delves deeper into even longer wavelengths.
In the mid-infrared, light can pass through clouds of gas and dust,
allowing us to see lots of stuff that was previously hidden.
In the MIRI image of the Southern Ring, you can actually see the two stars
at the center of this system.
The dimmer one is a white dwarf now.
It was once the red giant that threw off all of the gas and dust as it approached
the end of its life, while the brighter star is at an earlier stage in its life cycle.
The Southern Ring was also imaged by Hubble.
This was by far the best image we had until this week.
Here it is fading into the near-infrared and now into the mid-infrared.
Now moving around four times further away to probably the most dramatic
of the JWST’s first images, this is a small portion of the Carina Nebula,
around 7500 light-years away from Earth.
This is a different kind of nebula, not a shell of gas thrown off by a dying star,
but a giant cloud of gas and dust that is actively gathering together into new stars.
It’s one of the most active star-forming regions of our galaxy
and thus contains a tremendous amount of information about how stars form.
This image is around 16 light-years wide.
It’s a very charismatic structure.
Astronomers are calling it “The Cosmic Cliffs.”
Massive young stars that are just out of frame bombard the region
with cosmic radiation that wears away at the dense wall of gas,
while hot, ionized gas streams into the blue area.
Here I just want to note that all bright points of light imaged by Webb
will have these eight-pointed stars, six big points in a snowflake,
and two smaller horizontal points.
These are diffraction spikes.
They’re not a problem for science, as the telescope can be rotated so the spikes
don’t occlude a target of interest, but they do look extremely cool
and also will forever be an immediate sign that an image is from the Webb.
This is the NIRCam image, but now we can switch over to a smaller image that is a
composite of MIRI and NIRCam, which is an amazing example of how moving to
the mid-infrared allows us to see through clouds of dust to what lies beneath.
Hubble, of course, also imaged this area, and now we can show you
the transition from Hubble’s image, through the NIRCam MIRI composite image,
into the pure NIRCam image.
And man, I just can’t stop looking at this one.
Now it’s time to finally leave our galaxy…
zooming way out from 7500 light-years away to 300 million light-years away.
This is Stephan’s Quintet, four galaxies in a very tight local group,
and one galaxy (the one on the left) that is actually in the foreground,
only 40 million light-years from Earth.
It just happens to be in the picture too.
But those four galaxies are the tightest galaxy grouping we have ever discovered.
Two of them are in the process of merging and all four of them will merge eventually.
This is the largest of JWST’s first images, a composite of over 1000 images.
When all added up, it’s 150 million pixels.
And you can zoom in on just about any piece of this image and see not just those
five galaxies, but literally hundreds, maybe thousands of others in the background.
Transitioning to the MIRI (mid-infrared) image, we can see something immediately
pop out at us…there is something very bright in the uppermost galaxy.
That is a supermassive black hole, 24 million times the mass of the Sun, and it is
actively adding material to itself, and emitting more energy than 40 billion Suns.
Again, this has been imaged by Hubble.
Here that is transitioning into the MIRI image,
and finally, transitioning into that NIRCam image.
Now, our last image, of course, is the furthest…there is a galaxy cluster
4.6 billion light-years from the Earth in the center of this image.
You can see the galaxies like white blobs with bright points in their centers.
This is both the star of this image, and also not really the star.
It isn’t so much this galaxy cluster that is the exciting part.
It is what it enables.
Because it’s so massive, it creates a dip in space,
and as light moves through that dip, it bends.
And it bends in such a way that light coming from much more distant galaxies gets magnified.
These are galaxies that would be far too small to see
with a telescope even as advanced as the Webb.
This is called gravitational lensing and, in effect,
it has allowed us to make a telescope that is 4.6 billion light years long.
This is also a deep field image.
There isn’t much space in this image that doesn’t contain a galaxy,
and some of them are very distant.
And in general, because the universe’s expansion stretches out light,
making it redder, the redder a galaxy is, the older it is.
This tiny red dot that we’re zooming in on right now…
You can see it right in the middle there.
Yeah, I’m talking about that very insignificant little dot.
That is 13.1 billion light-years away…
and we are seeing it as it existed 13.1 billion years ago.
And of course Hubble imaged this area of space as well.
Here we move from Hubble’s image into Webb’s.
Clearly an improvement, but for a bit more context, remember that this image is
able to see not just more detail, but entire wavelengths Hubble could not see.
And also, Hubble can also see wavelengths that Webb cannot see…
making them a very powerful duo.
But while Hubble’s image required 10 days of imaging,
this image was taken by JWST in just 12.5 hours.
This mission has been a dream for decades, and that dream has come true.
But the best part is that the dream is going to keep coming true for years to come.
We here at SciShow space are going to be drooling over new images as they
come out, and we invite you to join us by subscribing here,
or by supporting us on Patreon at Patreon.com/SciShowSpace.
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