By now, perhaps, we should be getting used to unreal images
of the cosmos made with the James Webb Space Telescope. But a year after NASA
released the cosmic observatory’s first imagery, the space agency has dropped
yet another breath-taking snapshot of our universe.
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Wednesday’s image was Rho Ophiuchi, the closest nursery of
infant stars in our cosmic backyard. Located a mere 390 light years away from
Earth, this cloud complex is chock-full of stellar goodness.
Around 50 stars with masses comparable to our sun are
sprinkled in white: some fully formed and shining bright, others still hidden
behind dark, dense regions of interstellar dust. (Zoom in closer and you’ll
even find a faint galaxy or two.)
Near the center of the image is a mature star called S1, its
starlight illuminating the wispy yellow nebula around it. Toward the upper
right are streaming red jets of molecular hydrogen, material that gets spewed
out on either side of forming protostars. Black shadows near these regions are
accretion disks of swirling gas and dust — some of which could be in the
process of creating planetary systems.
The awe the image inspires is comparable to how researchers
feel about the Webb’s first year of science.
“As an astronomer that lives and breathes this mission, I’m
having to work really hard to keep up — there are so many discoveries,” said
Jane Rigby, the senior project scientist for the telescope at NASA’s Goddard
Space Flight Center. She finds it fitting that the customary gift for one-year
anniversaries is paper, because that’s exactly what researchers using the
telescope have been churning out for the past year: scientific papers.
The observatory launched on Christmas in 2021, and
scientists spent the next six months prepping the telescope for action:
unfolding its sun shield and the honeycomb-like array of golden mirrors, then
running tests of the four instruments used to observe the cosmos. When it was
ready, the Webb embarked on its journey to peer into the depths of the
universe.
The telescope’s agenda has been jam-packed ever since. It
has checked out asteroids, quasars, exoplanets and other cosmic phenomena
galore. For Rigby, one of the most gratifying accomplishments of this past year
is the way the mission has delivered on its promise to reveal the earliest
moments of cosmic time.
“That was the elevator pitch: We’re going to show you the
baby pictures of the universe,” she said.
Indeed it has. Before the James Webb Space Telescope,
astronomers knew of only a small handful of candidate galaxies that existed in
the first billion years after the Big Bang. Within the past year, hundreds of
them — bigger and brighter than expected, packed with forming stars swirling
around supermassive black holes — have been confirmed.
“The data from the telescope is better than we promised,”
Rigby said. “It has over-performed in almost every way.”
Already, the telescope’s schedule for the next year is set,
with roughly 5,000 hours of prime observing time for a suite of projects
related to galactic formation, stellar chemistry, the behavior of black holes,
the large-scale structure of our universe and more. Many of these projects —
more ambitious than last year, now that scientists know what the telescope can
do — are dedicated to following up on Webb’s own discoveries.
Though the telescope is operated by NASA, the European Space
Agency and the Canadian Space Agency, observers from around the globe were
selected to use it. “This is the telescope for humanity, and we want the best
ideas from the whole world,” Rigby said. “That’s how we’re doing things.”
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