I feel relieved, happy, and excited.
This is absolutely going to change the field.
For the first time, we’ll actually be able to start answering some of those questions
that we’ve always wondered about.
NASA just showed off the first full-color images from the James Webb Space Telescope.
We've got the whole world watching.
Are you ready to put the first image up?
- Let's do it. Let's do it.
And these images are just a glimpse into what JWST can really do.
It took two and a half decades to build and launch JWST, the largest and most advanced
space telescope ever built.
Unlike its predecessor Hubble, Webb can observe way farther into the infrared part of the
spectrum, giving it an even better look at the first galaxies formed after the Big Bang.
The telescope will help us tackle some big questions, like how did our cosmos begin?
And are we really alone out there?
Since launching in December, the telescope has had a busy schedule and a few surprises.
Originally, it had enough fuel to run for
about a decade, but thanks to the precision of its launch
the telescope saved fuel and doubled its lifespan to 20 years.
For the past six months, the telescope was in its commissioning phase — that meant
deploying it, cooling it down, aligning its mirrors, and prepping its instruments.
So far, everything’s been working great.
Which brings us back to the main event: the first imagery from JWST.
First, we have the deepest and sharpest infrared image ever taken of our Universe.
It’s a region full of thousands of galaxies.
And because the light from these distant objects takes so long to reach us, we’re seeing
them as they were when the Universe was less than a billion years old.
- You see it at first and you go, wait, that's not a whole lot different than Hubble.
But then you remember that this is a whole new set of colors, and then you are actually
looking far deeper than you ever could see with Hubble.
Then there’s the Carina Nebula, a stellar nursery.
This image provides a glimpse into how stars form.
It was imaged by Hubble, but this new view reveals new stars and some new mysteries.
We see examples of structures that, honestly, we don’t even know what they are.
Like, what’s going on here?
- And with Webb, we're going to be able to see even more detail of those stars and actually
even see through the dust into the little cocoons of dust where
the stars are forming.
On the other end of the stellar life cycle, there’s the Southern Ring.
It’s a region of cosmic dust and gas that surrounds a dying star.
The telescope captured two views in different chunks of the infrared spectrum, revealing
a clearer view of the binary star at the nebula's center.
Then there’s Stephan’s Quintet, a compact group of five galaxies.
Highlights here are two galaxies in the process of merging and a region of extremely bright
gas being pulled into a black hole.
And finally, the team released the telescope’s first spectrum of an exoplanet’s atmosphere.
This graph reveals the atmospheric composition
of a large, hot planet far from our own Solar System.
Data like this can reveal whether a world may sustain life as we know it. In this
case, we can see the telltale signs of water vapor.
- This is absolutely going to change the field.
We're finally going to be able to understand what it's like to live on these distant worlds
and what the climate and conditions are like on these planets.
This is just the start.
All of these images came from just five days of observation. And we still have 20 more
years left.
We are at the start of something spectacular.
And it feels, for some of us here, that this is kind of reached an ending point because
we went live through launch and we've commissioned it,
but now it's operating and the truth is we're just about to start.
The next thing we'll do is actually make the telescope work even better.
We’ve got it up there working better than we expected even already.
When I started in infrared astronomy 50 years ago, we couldn't even have detected some of
these sources.
Yet you can see all this beautiful structure in incredible detail.
But it all worked out
and it actually overperformed.
It just did better than we ever expected.
So it's the best outcome.
- And so this whole next year is going to be absolutely spectacular with result after
result after result.
And who knows, we may even get something that we have completely failed to predict, had
no idea would be something we see.
So what are you most excited about as JWST embarks on its mission?
Let us know in the comments below and make sure to subscribe
because we’re going to be posting new videos every couple of weeks. Don’t miss out!