![]() Webb will peer into the very atmospheres of exoplanets, some of which are potentially habitable. But scientists have only just begun to scratch the surface of these planets outside the solar system. And of the thousands of known exoplanets, none quite match up with the planets in our cosmic backyard. “You’re actually seeing bumps and wiggles that indicate the presence of water vapor in the atmosphere of this exoplanet,” she explained.Ĭould there be life in space? Scientists hope the James Webb Space Telescope will help them get closer to the answer.Īstronomers have yet to find a solar system quite like ours. The spectrum looks like “a bunch of bumps and wiggles,” which Knicole Colon, a NASA astrophysicist, said are “full of information.” Webb’s spectrum includes “the distinct signature of water, along with evidence for clouds and haze, in the atmosphere surrounding a hot, puffy gas giant planet orbiting a distant Sun-like star,” according to NASA. It has half the mass of Jupiter and completes an orbit around its star every 3.4 days. The spectrum includes different wavelengths of light that can reveal new information about the planet.ĭiscovered in 2014, WASP-96b is located 1,150 light-years from Earth. Webb’s study of the giant gas planet WASP-96b is the most detailed spectrum of an exoplanet to date. The observation, which reveals the presence of specific gas molecules based on tiny decreases in the brightness of precise colors of light, is the most detailed of its kind to date, demonstrating Webb’s unprecedented ability to analyze atmospheres hundreds of light-years away. ![]() NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has captured the distinct signature of water, along with evidence for clouds and haze, in the atmosphere surrounding a hot, puffy gas giant planet orbiting a distant Sun-like star. Gas gets heated to extremely high temperatures as it folds and becomes very bright, “40 billion times the luminosity of our sun’s,” she explained. “We cannot see the black hole itself, but we see the material swirling around being swallowed,” Giardino said. But it revealed an active black hole, according to ESA astronomer Giovanna Giardino. When the near-infared view is stripped away from the image, mostly gas and dust is seen. Mark McCaughrean, the senior adviser for science and exploration at the European Space Agency, said the image shows the view from our own Milky Way to far-away galaxies - even showing the creation of new stars. “Webb’s mosaic contains more than 150 million pixels and is constructed from about 1,000 image files,” according to NASA. Four of the five galaxies in the group “are locked in a cosmic dance of repeated close encounters,” according to a NASA statement. This compact galaxy group, first discovered in 1787, is located 290 million light-years away in the constellation Pegasus. The space telescope’s view of Stephan’s Quintet reveals the way galaxies interact with one another and how their interactions might shape galactic evolution. ![]() The information from Webb provides new insights into how galactic interactions may have driven galaxy evolution in the early universe. ![]() It contains over 150 million pixels and is constructed from almost 1,000 separate image files. This enormous mosaic is Webb’s largest image to date, covering about one-fifth of the Moon’s diameter. Today, NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope reveals Stephan’s Quintet, a visual grouping of five galaxies, in a new light. “So it’s a matter of picking and choosing colors that enhance the details and the structure in the image itself,” said Alyssa Pagan, science visual developer. “The reason we want to color the images is that there’s actually more information that you can get if you see it in color.” “We’re basically translating light that we can’t see into light that we can see by applying color, like red, green and blue to different filters that we have from Webb,” said Joe DePasquale, a senior science visuals developer. It takes a trained eye to take the exquisite data and pull out the beauty and the science potential. Targets have to be selected because Webb can’t see the whole sky at any given time to “avoid the mirror seeing direct sunlight” so it stays cold. They also put colors in the images so more information can be extracted.Ī committee was created to come up with a long list of targets to take the best images, according to Klaus Pontoppidan, a Webb project scientist. Scientists put in a lot of work into thinking about how images taken by the James Webb Space Telescope will show light that the human eye cannot see. ![]()
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