Well, this is it. We've been waiting 20 years to see these
images. And now today, we have finally seen them, we've got a
deep field image seeing almost to the beginning of the
Universe, we've got an exoplanet spectra detecting its
atmosphere, we've got colliding galaxies, the death of a star
and the birth of other stars. This is the new images from the
James Webb Space Telescope. Hi, everyone. I'm Fraser Cain. I'm
the publisher of Universe Today, I've been a space and astronomy
journalist for over 20 years. And I have been following this
story for my entire career in space journalism. So it's great
to be able to sit here and share these incredible first images.
Alright, let's get into them. The first image is a deep field
image of a galaxy cluster called S Max 0723. And this is an image
that has been taken by the Hubble Space Telescope, it's one
of those places that Hubble has looked where there should be
almost nothing in the sky. And yet, the more it looks, the more
galaxies pop out. But the thing that's really important is that
you've got this very large galaxy cluster sitting in the
middle of the image. Now, the light from this galaxy cluster
has been traveling to us for about 5 billion years about as
old as the Solar System. But then around this image, you've
got lots of other fainter galaxies that are farther and
farther away, the redder they look, probably the farther away
they are. And in many cases, you're seeing galaxies where the
light has been traveling for over 13 billion years to reach
us. But the part that's really amazing, is you've got these
little arcs that are all around almost like a circle around this
central galaxy cluster. And what this is, is gravitationally
lensed galaxies, so this giant galaxy cluster is sitting in the
foreground, and it's acting like a natural telescope lens, to
show off the galaxies that are in the background. And in this
case, those galaxies are just a few 100 million years after the
Big Bang itself, it's probable that the first stars ever formed
are in some of these galaxies. So it's important to put things
into context here. Now, when Hubble did some of its deepest
deep fields, it would do about three weeks of observations on
one specific spot in the sky. And it gets even more complex
than that, right? Hubble is orbiting around the Earth, webb,
out at the L2 Lagrange point can do its observations in one
contiguous go. And this is 12, and a half hours of exposure
from webb imaging, this one region to be able to produce
this image. And so not only is it a bigger, more sensitive
telescope, that's cool down to be able to see these wavelengths
that we just can't see with any other telescope. But it's a lot
more convenient, it's able to just stare continuously at one
target, and then move on to the next target. And so it's a lot
more productive of science instrument than kind of any
telescope we've ever seen before, how was not the best
comparison, because Hubble, of course, is able to do near
infrared, visible ultraviolet,
it's better to compare to another infrared telescope. In
this case, we can compare the image of the same region from
the wise telescope, compared to webb. And you can just see the
level of detail in the webb image is just so far beyond it's
really amazing. From a scientific perspective, what's
really amazing about webb is that it can view the spectra of
many galaxies all at the same time, it can do about 100
galaxies in a field of view, and determine their chemical
spectra. And what this is, this is the chemical fingerprint of
the galaxy, it tells it, the distance away to the Galaxy, how
fast it's receding away from us. But it also can tell you the
chemical characteristics of that galaxy. And the astronomers
working with Webb are just amazed that they can sense the
individual molecules that are present inside those galaxies to
know which ones are going through star formation, which
ones have ended their star formation, which ones have
recently collided. What kinds of heavier elements are being
produced in these galaxies. Again, it's this view, right to
the earliest moments of the Universe. When all of the more
complicated galaxies that we see today, we're starting to come
together. The second image is of an exoplanet. And we're going to
need to manage expectations here because I'm sure when you heard
that Webb was going to take a picture of an exoplanet you'd be
seeing like another Earth, but we still don't have a telescope
that is powerful enough to be able to see another Earth with
any kind of clarity. The greatest telescope that we can
imagine right now will show us nothing more than Then a single
pixel, it'll be really fascinating pixel, but still a
single pixel, the target planet is called wasp96b. And this is
an exoplanet. It's over 1000 light years away from us. Webb
was able to watch as the planet was passing directly in front of
its star was a, it was a transit that took about six and a half
hours long. And then they were able to take the chemical
signature the spectra of the atmosphere of this planet and
work out what kinds of chemicals are in it. And once again, we
get a sense of why this is such a dramatic increase from
something like Hubble, Hubble can't do a six and a half hour
continuous observation, watching the entire transit of a planet
because again, it's orbiting around the Earth, sometimes it's
viewed as blocked by the Earth, and so can only make partial
observations throughout the entire transit Webb, far away
from Earth can just watch the entire transit. And so we got
this incredibly detailed spectra of the atmosphere of wasp 96 b.
Analyzing the atmosphere of an exoplanet is something that's
only just been done a couple of times before using other space
telescopes, Spitzer has been able to do it, but nothing like
this. And to get this incredibly detailed chemical fingerprint of
this planet is just in its infancy right now. Now, when you
look at the spectra, what you're seeing is lines of absorption
where various chemicals are absorbing the light coming from
the planet's atmosphere. And the key ones, the ones that line up
are the presence of water vapor in the atmosphere of this
planet. And so that tells the astronomers that it has clouds,
and that there's haze in the atmosphere of this planet. We
also learn during the press conference that Webb will be
doing observations within the Solar System. So not only
exoplanets, but actually get images of Mars, and Jupiter and
Saturn, and so on. And in fact, they've already taken the images
of Jupiter and they say they're incredible. One of the
challenges in making web be able to do these kinds of solar
system observations is whether it can track its target fast
enough for fast moving targets like Jupiter. And so they were
able to do these tests of Jupiter. And they found that
yes, indeed, it can actually track Jupiter. And apparently,
the images are amazing. Although they haven't shown us those yet.
We should get those later on this week. The next image is of
a dying star a planetary nebula, and this is called the Southern
Ring Nebula or NGC 3132, located about 2500 light years away and
fully visible from people in the southern hemisphere. Once again,
this is an image that has been fairly well observed by Hubble.
So we can do a comparison, we can see the Hubble version. And
we can see the web version, what you're looking at is what's
called a planetary nebula. It is a star surrounded by rings of
gas and dust. And so this is a star that was probably similar
to our sun. And as it ran out of fuel in its core, it bloated up
as a red giant. And then it shrunk back down again, leaving
this outer shell of material that was then expanding outward.
And then it did it again, it sent out another ring of
material and then shrunk back down again. And it did this
multiple times until it ran out of juice. And then it just
shrunk down to become a white dwarf at the center of the
nebula. And so these expanding shells of stellar material are
still continuing to go out into the cosmos. And astronomers can
take these and go backwards in time. The outermost shell is the
one that was released the earliest while the innermost one
was released most recently. And they can see the different
compositions of the material as the star was evolving into its
final stages. And we actually got two images from Webb on
this. And so with the second image, they were actually able
to peer right down into the very heart of the nebula. And they
found that No, it's not a single star that died. That star was
actually in a binary system. So it has a binary companion, you
can see the dead white dwarf star, but you can also see the
star that it was with. And so these two stars are orbiting
around each other. And they are kind of whipping up and changing
the environment around them. And so it creates the shape of the
planetary nebula through the interactions of the stars. As
well, In the second image, you can see the blue regions and so
these actually are hydrocarbons that are being infused into this
nebula material. And so over time, these shells of gas and
dust are just going to continue expanding away and dissipate
into the Milky Way. And so the hydrocarbons are then expanding
outward into the galaxy and they can seed other stellar nebula
like the one that formed the Sun and the planets, and this is how
heavier elements can move from star system to star system,
building up the more complex molecules that we find here on
the Earth today. The next image is a fairly famous Galaxy group
called Stephens quintet. And it's made up of five galaxies,
but it's actually made of four galaxies, the leftmost galaxy is
only about 40 million light years away from us. So it's
actually way closer, the rest of the galaxies are about 290
million light years away. This image is actually the largest
image that Webb did, it's made up of 1000 separate exposures,
which together fill up about 1/5 of the area of the full moon on
the sky. So you can see, James Webb is a very detailed
instrument, they described it as holding a grain of rice at the,
with your outstretched arm. And that's how much of the sky web
is imaging each time, these four galaxies are definitely
interacting with each other. And in this infrared view, you can
see the tidal tails, and the gas and dust that is streaming from
one galaxy, the other thing tore each other apart at a structural
level. And you can see how this is having the impact, you've got
regions of increased star formation, and in the topmost
galaxy, so much material has actually gone into it, that the
supermassive black hole at the heart of the galaxy has become
activated, it started to actively feed on this material,
and then blast out radiation in its environment. This galaxy
group is very important, it is easy to see I've imaged it with
a telescope before. So it's the kind of thing that amateur
astronomers can see. But these kinds of interacting galaxies
are a lot more rare in the Universe today, now the Universe
is so stretched out. But in the early Universe, when the
Universe was a lot more dense, these kinds of galactic
interactions are happening a lot more commonly. And so to be able
to study one up close, will give a strong and has a good sense of
what they're looking at when they see the ones that are 13
plus billion years old. And the last image and I got to say they
did save the best for last. This is the Carina Nebula. It's a
star forming region located about 7500 light years away. And
this is a very well imaged Nebula, we've seen pictures of
it from the Hubble Space Telescope and many other
telescopes, it's very famous. It's very showy Nebula, you
know, if you remember, the Pillars of Creation shown by the
Hubble Space Telescope, this is the same kind of object, this is
going to be Webb's version of the pillars of creation. So just
give me a sense here at the top of this image, you see a lot of
really bright stars and this sort of blue nebulosity. And
then down at the bottom of the image, you've got all of this
rhetoric, material and Nebula, and you can see this really
crisp line between the top and the bottom, what's happening is
you've got these enormous blue hot stars that are more mature
and are blowing out these intense flows of radiation,
those radiation is sweeping down and striking the nebula material
down at the lower part of the image and causing it to pile up
and move like a cliff almost inside that nebula material.
With this compressed dense gas and dust, you've got newly
forming stars forming in these knots inside.
Because Webb has an infrared telescope, it can see through
the gas and dust that would normally obscure our view to
this material. And so astronomers have been able to
see hundreds of new stars that they had not been able to see
before in this nebula. And when you look at some of these
features, they do seem kind of reminiscent of the pillars of
creation. And it's the same function, you've got this really
powerful stellar wind that's been blasted off these giant hot
stars that is impacting where the stars are, and blowing away
this material. And so the big question is like, how long can
the stars inside the nebula grow material until the radiation
from their neighbors blast it all away? What holds the star
formation in the star forming regions? This is one of the most
exciting instruments one of the best ways that we're going to be
able to find this out. All right, well, those were the five
images that we got from Webb today. Absolutely stunning. I'm
I'm excited to see what happens. Now. This is just the beginning.
We learned from NASA that the orbit that Webb was put on from
the Ariane five launcher was so precise, that it's probably
going to be able to remain functional for about 20 years.
And so this is just the beginning of this long journey.
Astronomers haven't had a chance to really digest the images that
we're looking at. Each one is going to keep people busy. See,
probably for years. And yet, because it's so powerful because
it's so fast because it can make these continuous observations.
It's just going to keep funneling the science our way.
In fact, the part that's kind of exciting is that we don't know
what are going to be the biggest mysteries that Webb is going to
unfold. Hubble's job was to help measure the expansion rate of
the Universe, not only to do that, but it helped learn that
the expansion of the Universe is accelerating thanks to dark
energy, but then it did everything else. Image
exoplanets, looking to nebula peered at the vast distances of
the Universe looked inside the Solar System turned up mysteries
that we didn't even know questions we didn't even know
that we had, and web will do the same. So we don't even know what
questions Webb is going to provide to us, and help us
search out the answers. Of course, we've done lots of
information about Webb here on this channel, we did a half hour
long, deep dive into Webb, everything, the background of
the telescope, what it's designed to do, and how it's
supposed to see it, of course, before we'd seen the first
images, so use that as a way to kind of inform what it is that
you're looking at. I've done an interview with Dr. John Mather,
the Nobel Prize winning scientist Behind the Webb Space
Telescope. He started this idea 25 years ago, and was there on
the unveiling of the images, absolutely fascinating,
wonderful guy to talk to, again, a lot of really deep insights
about web, but also the other ideas that he has for the future
of astronomy. I did an interview with Lee Feinberg, who is the
project manager for the Webb Space Telescope, and again, has
overseen the telescope from the inception to today. And you get
a lot more behind the scenes information about what it's like
to go through it. And we'll put some more interviews that I've
done in the description down below. Alright, that is my first
reaction to the images that we got from webb today. I'm still
processing still digesting, still learning about what it is
that we saw. And I know that we're going to be getting many,
many more images in the days to come. And hopefully I can help
give you perspective about what it is that you're looking at.
This was a special event. Obviously we dropped everything
to bring you this coverage, but we will be doing our regular
News episode on Friday. So definitely come back then. And
if you want more news, subscribe to my weekly email newsletter.
Go to UniverseToday.com/newsletter to
sign up. Alright, we'll see you on Friday.