"When you start something this big, you know, there's always a possibility it might not work. "I'm thrilled and I'm relieved," John Mather, an astrophysicist at Goddard and senior project scientist for Webb, said. Over the years, Webb was sometimes severely strapped for funding, and at least once was in danger of being canceled due to soaring costs.ĭespite the rocky road, with Webb now safe in space, scientists say that the now functional telescope, which is performing better than expected in almost every way, should be able to operate for the next two decades. In turn, launch was the culmination of over two decades of development, starting in 1996, and general discussion about the project that began even earlier. The gorgeous new images follow seven months of painstaking deployment of the telescope since its launch on Dec. (Image credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, and STScI) This mosaic, a composite of near and mid-infrared data showing Stephan's Quintet, is Webb's largest image to date, covering an area of the sky one-fifth of the moon's diameter as seen from Earth. "You're actually seeing bumps and wiggles that indicate the presence of water vapor in the atmosphere of this exoplanet." "You get a bunch of what looks like bumps and wiggles to some people, but it's actually full of information," Colón said. "This is just one sliver of data that Webb is providing us, using the NIRISS instrument specifically." "We've been able to use other telescopes to explore exoplanet atmospheres in the infrared, but not to this level of detail," Knicole Colón, an astrophysicist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, said. And Webb's new data offers scientists more data than ever before about that strange atmosphere. The only known cloudless planet, WASP-96 b has been an enigma and a prime target for further study since its discovery in 2013. It orbits its star every 3.4 days, and has a unique, cloudless atmosphere made largely of sodium. The gas giant world, about half the size of Jupiter, is the closest of the newly revealed objects, at about 1,150 light-years away. The final piece of Webb's first public science results wasn't an image at all, but a spectrum - a representation of the amount of different wavelengths of light emitted by an exoplanet dubbed WASP-96 b. "As we go into the center, we see kind of the surprise for us, which is - we knew this was a binary star, but we effectively didn't really see much of the actual star that produced the nebula, but now in MIRI, this star glows red because it has dust around it, so in MIRI, we got to see both stars very clearly," he added.Īn analysis of James Webb Space Telescope data identifies chemicals present in the atmosphere of the hot exoplanet WASP-96 b. The new images show the shells formed by that gas, Karl Gordon, an astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute, said during the event, as well as patches in the nebula where starlight shines through. Having blown off all its outer layers, the dying white dwarf star at the nebula's heart is unimaginably hot and releasing intense ultraviolet radiation, causing the gas around it to light up. It is a planetary nebula, or an expanding cloud of gas surrounding a dying star. In contrast, The Southern Ring Nebula is closer to Earth - a mere 2,000 light-years away. This image of the Southern Ring nebula is from Webb's NIRCam instrument, which saw this nebula in the near-infrared.
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