This is what the universe looked like over 13 billion years ago

1st images from James Webb Space Telescope released by NASA

The first image revealed thousands of galaxies – including the faintest objects ever observed in the infrared from Webb’s view. If you held a grain of sand up to the sky at arm’s length, that tiny speck is the size of Webb’s view in this image. (NASA)

A full set of pictures showing our universe in its earliest phase was released Tuesday by NASA.

The James Webb Space Telescope has captured light traveling to us from the farthest reaches of the universe. The telescope peeks back in time 13 and a half billion years ago when the earliest stars formed.

Light has been traveling to us for billions of years and it showcases what happened in the earliest stage of the cosmos after the big bang when the galaxies expanded.

The powerful lens penetrates dust clouds revealing distant galaxies, the formation of stars and black holes devouring matter.

The first image revealed thousands of galaxies — including the faintest objects ever observed in the infrared from Webb’s view. It shows clusters of white light about the time when our sun and earth first formed. Some galaxies have been stretched and pulled from the gravity of other galaxies. The faint red galaxies are some of the oldest, about 13.1 billion years in the past, less than a billion years after the big band. The oxygen made in these stars constitutes the same oxygen in our bodies!

This slice of the vast universe covers a patch of sky approximately the size of a grain of sand held at arm’s length by someone on the ground. The star-shaped spike that looks like lens flares is actually a diffraction spike resulting from bright light bent by the edges of the telescope.

The detailed resolution of the Webb will help detect potentially habitable planets beyond Earth. This is the first exoplanet revealed by Webb which is over a thousand light-years away called WASP-96 b. Humans wouldn’t survive in a place like it. It shows steamy water vapor in the atmosphere with clouds and a temperature greater than 1,000°F It has about half the mass of Jupiter and orbits its star every 3.4 days.

Webb’s Near-Infrared Imager and Slitless Spectrograph (NIRISS) measured light from the WASP-96 system for 6.4 hours as the planet moved across the star. The result is a light curve showing the overall dimming of starlight during the transit, and a transmission spectrum revealing the brightness change of individual wavelengths of infrared light between 0.6 and 2.8 microns. (NASA)

This is what a dying star looks like. The Southern Ring, or “Eight-Burst” nebula, is a planetary nebula of an expanding cloud of gas and dust that surrounds a star at the end of its life. It is nearly half a light-year in diameter and is located approximately 2,000 light-years away from Earth. Blue haze is ionized gas. The center glows red from the dust, and on the left infrared view, you can see two stars at the center.

(nasa)

Carina Nebula: The Carina Nebula is one of the largest and brightest nebulae in the sky, located approximately 7,600 light-years away in the southern constellation Carina. Nebulae are stellar nurseries where stars form. The Carina Nebula is home to many massive stars, several times larger than the Sun.

Stephan’s Quintet: shows 5 galaxies about 290 million light-years away from Earth. Four of the galaxies are locked in a cosmic dance of repeated close encounters. Tight groups like this may have been more common in the early universe when their superheated, infalling material may have fueled very energetic black holes called quasars. Even today, the topmost galaxy in the group harbors a supermassive black hole 24 million times the mass of the Sun. It is actively pulling in material and puts out light energy equivalent to 40 billion suns.

These pictures represent just the start of Webb’s general science operations where research teams around the world vie for use of the space observatory. Among the investigations planned for the first year are studies of two hot exoplanets classified as “super-Earths” for their size and rocky composition: The Webb has fuel for 20 years of new photographic discovery.


About the Author:

After covering the weather from every corner of Florida and doing marine research in the Gulf, Mark Collins settled in Jacksonville to forecast weather for The First Coast.