NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has spotted a rare and “extremely red” supermassive black hole lurking in one of the most ancient corners of the universe.
Astronomers suggest the vermilion black hole was the result of an expanding universe just 700 million years following the Big Bang, as detailed in a paper published this month in the journal Nature. Its colors are likely due to a thick layer of dust blocking much of its light, they posit.
While the cosmic monster was technically first discovered last year, researchers have now found that it’s far more massive than any other object of its kind in the area, making it a highly unusual find that could rewrite the way we understand how supermassive black holes grow relative to their host galaxies.
The team studied data collected by the James Webb that examined a group of distant galaxies in the central core of Pandora’s Cluster, also known as Abell 2744, some 4 billion light-years from Earth.
Thanks to gravitational lensing, an effect caused by massive objects bending the surrounding spacetime, astronomers were able to get a detailed look at even more distant galaxies beyond it.
“We were very excited when JWST started sending its first data,” said co-lead and Ben-Gurion University postdoctoral researcher Lukas Furtak in a statement, recalling coming across “three very compact yet red-blooming objects” that “prominently stood out and caught our eyes.”
Thanks to their appearance, Furtak and his colleagues concluded the three objects — which turned out to be images of the same source — had to be a “quasar-like object.” Quasars are galactic cores that emit huge amounts of electromagnetic radiation caused by a supermassive black hole in its center sucking up nearby gas and dust.
“Analysis of the object’s colors indicated that it was not a typical star-forming galaxy,” said program co-lead and University of Pittsburgh observational astronomer Rachel Bezanson in the statement. “Together with its compact size, it became evident this was likely a supermassive black hole, although it was still different from other quasars found at those early times.”
Thanks to detailed measurements of the object’s redshift, the amount the wavelength of light stretches relative to how fast a celestial object is moving compared to us, the team was also able to determine its mass.
According to those calculations, it’s extremely massive, potentially packing a sizable percentage of the mass of its host galaxy into a tiny region, raising some intriguing questions as to how the growth of black holes and their host galaxies are related.
“In a way, it’s the astrophysical equivalent of the chicken and egg problem,” said co-lead and Ben-Gurion University professor Adi Zitrin in the statement. “We do not currently know which came first — the galaxy or black hole, how massive the first black holes were, and how they grew.”
Following in the footsteps of the James Webb Space Telescope, NASA’s next super telescope in space would be the first specifically designed to search for signs of life on planets orbiting other stars.
Now that the James Webb Space Telescope is fulfilling its mission, NASA has a roadmap for its next massive undertaking: the Habitable Worlds Observatory, with which it hopes to take a picture of an Earth-like planet (and then some).
It takes time to put together a space-based super-observatory. The James Webb, the largest and most complex space telescope ever built, was first conceived in the late 1990s, and was originally targeted for launch by 2010. But because it was so complex, with its series of origami-like folding mirrors and heat shields, development and testing took much longer than expected. It wasn’t until Christmas day of 2021 that the observatory finally launched.
In many ways, the James Webb marks the end of an era—and the beginning of a new one. Throughout the 1990s, NASA launched a series of “Great Observatories,” massive telescopes targeting a specific wavelength range and set of science targets. The James Webb’s predecessor, the Hubble, focused on visible wavelengths of light, while the Spitzer Space Telescope worked with infrared, and the Chandra X-ray Observatory conducted x-rays, of course.
The James Webb Space Telescope is situated about 9.32 million miles from Earth, peering into the distant universe.
The James Webb, itself, is focused mainly on infrared light from the wider universe, but it has no Great Observatory companion in other wavelength ranges. Plus, because the James Webb needs to actively cool itself to work, in roughly a decade it will run out of fuel and have to power down. These are weaknesses that the astronomical community quickly realized as soon as the telescope’s schedule began to slip.
The Habitable Worlds Observatory, or HWO, is the first step toward filling that gap, complementing the work of the James Webb, and leading the next generation of Great Observatories.
How to Find an Alien, Habitable World
The primary goal of the HWO (which will surely get a better name as time goes on) is exactly what’s on its eponymous label: to observe habitable worlds.
As of the writing of this article, there is no evidence whatsoever of any kind of life— intelligent, or single-celled, or anything in between—existing in the universe. As far as we know, we are completely and utterly alone. But it’s a big universe out there, and we’ve only just started looking in earnest. Our Milky Way galaxy alone is home to roughly 300 billion stars, and at least as many planets (with some estimates suggesting that there are trillions of worlds out there).
Most of those worlds are inhospitable and uninhabitable, just like most of the worlds in the solar system. But a certain fraction of them will be very similar to Earth, with just the right mass and density, and just the right distance from its parent star, to host liquid water on their surfaces—and potentially life. This is a very rough guess, but astronomers believe there are 5–10 billion Earth-like planets orbiting sun-like stars in our galaxy alone.
But if we want to show that any of those planets are full of life, then we have our work cut out for us. The nearest potentially habitable planet will be hundreds, if not thousands, of light years away. We can’t possibly go to those planets and poke around for ourselves, so we’re going to have to find evidence for life remotely.
This is what HWO plans to do, and it will combine two critical pieces of technology to make it happen. One is a giant mirror, at least 18 feet across, comparable to the James Webb’s impressive array. This will allow the HWO to peer into the distant universe and have high enough resolution to take pictures of alien planets.
But those alien planets orbit stars, and the stars themselves give off so much light that the planets will be hiding in their glare. So, the designers of the HWO are exploring options to reduce that glare. One option is a free-flying sunshade, a giant structure resembling a metallic flower that will orbit in tandem with the HWO. The sunshade will block the light of a parent star, allowing the observatory to directly image the target planet.
Another option is a coronagraph, a smaller device built into the main body of the HWO itself that accomplishes a similar function. The James Webb carries a coronagraph, as does the Nancy Grace Roman telescope, an upcoming space mission that will work to survey large portions of the wider universe.
Once it is launched, the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will survey the infrared universe from L2, a vantage point about 930,000 miles from Earth, in the direction opposite the sun.
Either way, the plans for the HWO call for it to directly image at least 25 planets outside the solar system, with the list of candidates provided by the James Webb and complementary ground-based observatories. The HWO will examine the light reflected from the atmospheres of those planets in search of signs of life.
Those signs of life will be anything that throws an atmosphere out of equilibrium. For example, Earth’s atmosphere has way more oxygen than it normally would without life. That’s because oxygen is a byproduct of photosynthesis. Earth also has extra levels of methane, a byproduct of many biological processes, and carbon dioxide, a result of animal respiration. Without life, our atmosphere would look completely different.
The hope is that the HWO will find these kinds of “biosignatures,” the telltale signs of life, in the chemical makeup of the atmospheres of its target worlds through a technique known as spectroscopy. With spectroscopy, astronomers break up light from the target into all of its different wavelengths, known as a spectrum. Individual elements and molecules give off “fingerprints” of specific wavelengths of light. By looking for those fingerprints in the spectrum, astronomers can determine what elements are present in the target, and the relative amounts of those elements. This allows them to figure out what an alien atmosphere is made of all from the comfort of their home (or office).
A Step Forward for Humanity
Currently, the HWO is in the design and planning stages. Astronomers from across the United States have come together to form various working groups to narrow down the science goals, find the best fits in terms of technology, and provide a roadmap for getting the instrument designed, built, and launched. It will be quite a while—perhaps as long as two decades—before the instrument is launched.
But it will be worth it.
Beside its search for life, the HWO will be a premiere astronomical observatory, a successor to the James Webb in the same way that Webb was a successor to Hubble. Astronomers will use the HWO to study the properties of galaxies on the far side of the universe, to watch as cosmic explosions twinkle in the night sky, and to peer into the hearts of nebulae, star-forming regions, and more
And honestly, whichever way it goes will be a step forward for humanity. Either way, we will find definitive signs of life, and we will know we are not alone in the universe (even if the alien world is populated solely by single-celled organisms, we will know that life is possible in the wider cosmos).
Or, we will find nothing, and we will confirm that our fragile world that we call home is that much more rare, precious, and worth preserving.
The James Webb Space Telescope peered 13.4 billion years into the past and found a black hole-sized conundrum.
The oldest supermassive black hole astronomers have ever seen is gorging messily on the heart of its host galaxy, which may ultimately doom the black hole along with its prey.
In the process, this ancient black hole — or at least as it looked 13.4 billion years ago — may offer important clues about how the universe’s first supermassive black holes formed and grew. University of Cambridge astrophysicist Roberto Maiolino and his colleagues recently used the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) instruments to peer into the blazing heart of the black hole’s host galaxy, GN-z11, and watch its voracious feast. They published their work in the journal Nature.
This artisti’s concept shows what a black hole might look like if we could see the lines of its magnetic field.Getty Images/Getty Images News/Getty Images
Big for Its Age
The light we see from tiny galaxy GN-z11 began its journey to Earth when the universe was just 400 million years old, which makes the supermassive black hole in the galaxy’s center the oldest one astronomers have ever seen. Based on recent observations as part of the JWST Advanced Deep Extragalactic Survey (JADES), Maiolino and his colleagues say this ancient supermassive black hole is several million times more massive than our Sun. That massive bulk puts it roughly in the same ballpark as Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole at the heart of our own thoroughly modern Milky Way Galaxy.
The black hole’s size also comes as a supermassive surprise since many astrophysicists expected the universe’s first generation of supermassive black holes to take at least one billion years to grow so large.
In their recent paper, Maiolino and his colleagues say there are essentially two ways this black hole could have grown so large, so quickly. The first option is that it was “born” already tens of thousands of times more massive than our Sun when a gargantuan cloud of gas collapsed under its own gravity to form the enormous “seed” of a supermassive black hole. Starting from such large seeds, those original black holes would have needed less time to grow to millions of times our Sun’s mass.
The second option is that the first black holes, including the one at the heart of GN-z11, formed when the first generation of massive stars burned up their fuel and collapsed, leaving behind black holes dozens of times the mass of our Sun. Those (relatively) tiny black hole “seeds” would have needed about a billion years to swallow up enough gas to grow to supermassive size — unless they were eating a lot faster than astrophysicists expected.
“It’s just that they don’t want to release or confirm those results until they can be entirely sure, but we found a planet that seems to be giving off strong signals of biological life.”
Ars Technica reports that the persistent rumor that the James Webb Space Telescope has found a planet with strong signs of life has recently hit a new high among the scientific community. A lot of the hype may be overblown, but at the very least the speculation reflects the space telescope’s extraordinary promise in the field of exobiology.
Though a NASA official told Ars that no “definitive evidence” has been found so far, they acknowledged the possibility of a huge discovery on the horizon that — sorry, folks — would take years worth of followup research to confirm.
“It is anticipated that JWST observations may lead to the initial identification of potential biosignatures that could make habitability more or less likely for a given exoplanet,” Knicole Colón, the James Webb’s deputy project scientist for exoplanet science, told Ars. “Future missions will be needed to conclusively establish the habitability of an exoplanet.”
It’s an answer worded to tamp down any out-of-control rumors, but it certainly leaves the door open to some exciting possibilities — a no, but “not a hard no,” in Ars‘ analysis.
According to Ars, excitement over that discovery was documented — and revived — by a recent article from The Spectator titled “Have we just discovered aliens?” which features opinions from respected figures in the astronomy community, including a tantalizing quote from CNBC‘s interview with the British astronaut Tim Peake.
“Potentially, the James Webb telescope may have already found [alien life],” Peake said, as quoted by The Spectator. “It’s just that they don’t want to release or confirm those results until they can be entirely sure, but we found a planet that seems to be giving off strong signals of biological life.”
Signature Move
No doubt, the evidence so far is encouraging. The biosignature detected on K2-18 b is a molecule called dimethyl sulfide, a smelly substance that on Earth is produced only by living organisms.
That’s a huge clue that this “Hyacean” world — one with oceans and a hydrogen-rich atmosphere — is potentially home to life. Even better, the exoplanet lies in its star’s habitable or “Goldilocks” zone, meaning the surface is neither too hot nor too cold for life as we know it.
But the evidence, as Colón said, isn’t definitive. More observations, perhaps with entirely new instruments, will be needed to confirm the detection. Moreover, it’s possible that dimethyl sulfide can be produced without life. Understandably, scientists don’t want to jump the gun, as a long history of extraterrestrial hoaxes and spoofs have haunted the field.
All those caveats aside, it hasn’t stopped many in the community from being hopeful.
“I think we are going to get a paper that has strong evidence for a biosignature on an exoplanet very, very soon,” said Rebecca Smethurst, an astrophysicist at the University of Oxford, as quoted by The Spectator.
NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) hasn’t even officially kicked off scientific operations, but astronomers are already eager to search for alien civilizations using the uber-expensive observatory.
The telescope is powerful enough to directly image individual exoplanets orbiting distant stars, a tantalizing prospect that some say could lead to us finding out once and for all if we’re alone in the universe — or not.
In a not-yet-peer-reviewed paper spotted by Universe Today, a team of astronomers from NASA and other institutions suggested that the JWST could be used to spot planets with detectable traces of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) in their atmosphere.
Their reasoning: greenhouses gases like CFCs could be signs of extraterrestrial civilizations, since the same gases led to humanity punching a hole in the Earth’s ozone layer, in a clear marker of an industrialized civilization. In short, aliens who have polluted their atmosphere could provide a giveaway sign of extraterrestrial life.
Thirst TRAPPIST-1
The team even identified a good first target to look for CFCs: TRAPPIST-1, a system made up of several Earth-sized planets orbiting a red dwarf star a mere 40 light-years away.
“CFCs are a notable example of a technosignature on Earth, and the detection of CFCs on a planet like TRAPPIST-1e would be difficult to explain through any biological or geologic features we know of today,” read the paper.
TRAPPIST-1 is relatively dim, which means the JWST’s infrared spectrometers wouldn’t be overpowered by it. In fact, our own Sun would be far too bright if a telescope like the JWST were to attempt the same thing, but from a TRAPPIST-1 vantage point.
But that could soon change as we come up with even more capable technologies.
“In the next few decades there will be at least two of Earth’s passive technosignatures, radio emissions and atmospheric pollution, that would be detectable by our own technology around the nearest star,” the team concludes.
If there’s alien life out there, this planet is an exceptional candidate.
Image by Gb89.2
NASA’s James Webb Telescope is gearing up to officially begin scientific operations later this summer. And scientists are already excited for it to start scanning distant worlds for signs of life.
There are plenty of places to look, of course. Researchers have already confirmed the existence of almost 5,000 exoplanets, with many more on the way. And out of an estimated 300 million planets suspected to harbor a “Goldilocks” region in which liquid water and thereby life could exist, NASA’s Kepler mission alone has confirmed several hundred.
Canadian astronaut legend Chris Hadfield has his own suggestion, opining this past weekend that Kepler-442b would be “an excellent planet for [NASA’s James Webb Telescope] to have a look at.”
Hadfield’s reasoning, according to a quote tweet, was that some experts actually believe that Kepler-442b — which is about 1,200 light-year from Earth, by the way — may be more habitable than our own planet.
In a paper published in The Astrophysical Journal in 2015, a team of astrobiologists argued that several exoplanets identified by NASA’s Kepler and K2 missions, including Kepler-442b, were highly likely to possess liquid surface water, like Earth.
“We ranked the known Kepler and K2 planets for habitability and found that several have larger values of H [the probability of it being terrestrial] than Earth,” reads the paper.
The researchers’ goal was to cut down on the number of exoplanet candidates so we could hit the ground running and observe the most likely candidates first.
“Basically, we’ve devised a way to take all the observational data that are available and develop a prioritization scheme, so that as we move into a time when there are hundreds of targets available, we might be able to say, ‘OK, that’s the one we want to start with,'” lead author Rory Barnes from the University of Washington told Wired in 2015.
NASA’s JWST will use various methods to take a close peek at the atmospheres of exoplanets orbiting distant stars. Some scientists even suspect it’ll be sensitive enough to spot atmospheric pollution from any alien civilizations lurking out there.
Regardless, we could find out soon. The telescope recently locked on to its first star, and is now calibrating its delicate array of golden mirrors. It’s our best chance yet at getting a close look at habitable planets outside of our own solar system.
A newly released image from the James Webb Space Telescope provides a detailed view of a star’s infancy
Credit: ESA/Webb/NASA, CSA/Tom Ray (Dublin)
Shrouded in a turbulent knot of dust and gas, a fledgling star expels supersonic jets of material that stretch thousands of times the distance from Earth to the sun. This is the dramatic adolescence of HH 211, captured by the James Webb Space Telescope’s Near-Infrared Camera and described in a study recently published in Nature.
Herbig-Haro objects, abbreviated “HH,” are formed when fast-moving matter spewed from protostars collides with surrounding dust and gas, producing shockwaves “rather like a bullet going through the air,” says the study’s lead author Tom Ray, an astrophysicist at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies. These collisions excite the gas, releasing infrared light that JWST can observe.
In this image from the study, the red depicts excited hydrogen gas that rotates and vibrates at a few thousand kelvins, surrounded by green from carbon monoxide and blue from the young star’s reflected light. The protostar itself sits in the rotating, dusty disk at the center of the image, where infrared radiation cannot escape because of the density of the dust and gas. Astrophysicists think the matter ejected by the wiggling jets slows the disk’s spin, which allows the star to grow.
Whereas older stars like our sun blast atoms, ions and molecules into space, HH 211 ejects mostly molecular matter. Such a surprising difference can help astrophysicists understand more about how stars grow out of this critical stage of development, Ray says.
“I could stare at this for a long time,” says astrophysicist Chin-Fei Lee of Taiwan’s Academia Sinica, who has previously observed HH 211 using the ground-based telescope ALMA in Chile. ALMA has observed molecular outflows, but it cannot detect any high-temperature ionized material ejected by the jets. JWST did so and produced images with much higher resolution. “This is so impressive to me,” Lee says, “because we see the whole structure and the beautiful jet.”
The Universe is an amazing place. Under the incredible, infrared gaze of JWST, it’s coming into focus better than ever before.
The near-infrared JWST view (with NIRCam) of the Ring Nebula showcases tendril-like filaments emerging from the main ring, a thin series of concentric shells outside the main ring, and wispy, knotty globules on the interior of the main ring: approximately 20,000 of them. The nebula is very hydrogen-rich, with carbon-based molecules appearing in a thin ring. Credit: ESA/Webb, NASA, CSA, M. Barlow, N. Cox, R. Wesson
Key Takeaways
2023 marked the very first full year of science operations for JWST, which only began taking science data halfway through 2022.
With hundreds of image releases and thousands of scientific papers that have already come from humanity’s latest flagship astrophysics observatory, the scientific value is beyond reproach.
Here are some of the greatest images of the past year acquired with JWST, with some of the mind-blowing science behind what it’s been seeing.
Although it might seem that the world changed long ago from the Hubble era to the JWST era, the reality is that humanity’s greatest space-based observatory of all-time is less than two years old. It launched on Christmas Day, 2021, and required six months of deployment, commissioning, and calibration operations before it was ready to begin the primary phase of its life: full-time science operations. Since those milestones were achieved in July of 2022, JWST has been our cosmic workhorse, revealing the Universe in a whole new light, with unprecedented resolution and wavelength coverage to view the cosmos.
Top Stories
While its first sets of spectacular images were released during 2022, this past year, 2023, represents the very first year that we had this remarkable observatory operating full-time, surveying the Universe near and far to reveal some of the most incredible views, plus many unexpected scientific discoveries, that pretty much no one could have anticipated. Here, without further ado, are my favorite JWST science images released in 2023.
1.) Our most distant black hole ever. It was only last month, while combining Chandra X-ray data with JWST’s deep, infrared views of galaxy cluster Abell 2744, that scientists revealed a tiny, distant, early galaxy with only around 10-to-100 million solar masses worth of material in it, but that was incredibly X-ray luminous, indicating an active black hole of around 9 million solar masses. Not only is this the most distant black hole ever discovered, it’s also our first example of such an extreme mass ratio, where the central black hole is right around as massive as all the stars in the host galaxy combined. Our understanding of black hole-galaxy formation and coevolution will never be the same.
Credits: NASA, ESA, A. Loll/J. Hester (Arizona State University); NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, T. Temim (Princeton University); Processing: E. Siegel
2.) JWST’s view of the Crab Nebula. In the year 1054, a supernova went off in the Milky Way galaxy: so brilliant and enduring it was visible from Earth for a long period of time. Now, nearly 1000 years later, we can look in that same region of sky and find the Crab Nebula: a supernova remnant more than 10 light-years across, with a young, energetic, spinning neutron star at its core, the Crab Pulsar. Whereas Hubble’s visible light views highlight various elements and knots of gas that reflect light, JWST’s infrared views showcase the presence of dust, accelerated electrons, and even the carved-out features by the central pulsar’s winds and magnetism. The question of the mass mystery, or of where all the supposedly “missing material” that would have been needed for the progenitor star to explode, may yet find its solution in the still-being-analyzed JWST data.
3.) JWST’s deepest-ever view: the JADES view. The JWST Advanced Deep Extragalactic Survey, or JADES, collaboration has released a fully zoomable, explorable view of their field, with various NIRCam filters and NIRSpec spectra capable of being overlaid atop an enormous set of the objects imaged. Although this represents a relatively narrow field-of-view in the sky, it contains the most distant galaxy ever discovered so far, as well as a slew of candidate objects that may yet prove to be even farther away. It showcases the incredible reach and variety of what’s possible with JWST.
4.) JWST peers inside the Orion Nebula. When you look inside the nearest large star-forming region to us in the Milky Way, the Orion Nebula, what are you going to find? Under JWST’s eyes, there are an enormous number of brilliant, glittering new stars still in the process of forming. Some of them, shown here, are Herbig-Haro objects: massive young stars that are highlighted by stellar outflows. In other cases, there are proto-stars, still in the process of formation, young singlet and binary stars that have already finished forming, and nebulous regions that even JWST cannot penetrate. Lastly, there were some surprises: Jupiter-mass objects that are members of no stellar system, including a surprisingly large fraction of them that are binary objects. The images are as beautiful as the science is profound.
Credit: P. van Dokkum et al., Nature Astronomy accepted, 2023
5.) The most distant gravitational lens ever. At the center of this image, a massive compact galaxy is found, located about 17 billion light-years away within this expanding Universe. The ring around it, with two red spots, is actually a single, more distant galaxy that’s located along the same line-of-sight as the closer galaxy, but gravity has distorted it into a ring: an example of gravitational lensing. While more distant background lenses have been spotted, this represents the most distant foreground lens — the object actually doing the lensing — ever discovered.
Credit: Jose M. Diego (IFCA), Brenda Frye (University of Arizona), Patrick Kamieneski (ASU), Tim Carleton (ASU), Rogier Windhorst (ASU); Processing: Alyssa Pagan (STScI), Jake Summers (ASU), Jordan C. J. D’Silva (UWA), Anton M. Koekemoer (STScI), Aaron Robotham (UWA), Rogier Windhorst (ASU)
6.) The most massive galaxy cluster for its time. Although galaxy clusters are found all across the Universe, they’re expected to grow larger and larger in mass over cosmic time. For the time at which it was discovered in the Universe, the El Gordo galaxy cluster, imaged here by JWST, is the most massive one known: with over two quadrillion solar masses of material inside it, despite its light coming from more than 5 billion years ago. Within this cluster, marked A and B, are the gravitationally lensed galaxies known as “La Flaca,” which is Spanish for “the skinny one” (a fitting counterpart to El Gordo, or “the fat one”) and the Fishhook. In reality, both of these lensed galaxies are completely normal; their light is stretched into these unusual shapes by the foreground gravity of the galaxy cluster in front of them.
Credit: J.M. Diego et al. (PEARLS collaboration), A&A, 2023
7.) The most distant red supergiant star ever. Located in the same field as El Gordo, and hence in the same field as the Fishhook and the “La Flaca” lensed galaxies, is a single red supergiant star known as Quyllur: the most distant red supergiant ever discovered. Although the previously-discovered star Earendel, also imaged by JWST but discovered first by Hubble, is even farther, this shows that finding individual stars in the early Universe isn’t a one-off proposition, but rather that the combination of JWST’s incredible capabilities plus the enhancement of gravitational lensing can reveal individual stars farther back in cosmic time than via any other method.
8.) Triply-lensed “Supernova H0pe” discovered. Sometimes, very distant galaxies have their light stretched out into multiple images by the effects of gravitational lensing. When we’re very lucky, a transient event, such as a supernova, will occur in that lensed galaxy, allowing humanity to observe the supernova event on replay in each of the multiple images. The reason this provides such hope, or H0pe in this case, is because the quest to measure the expansion rate of the Universe today, also known as H0 or the Hubble constant, gives two different answers dependent on which set of methods are used.
The discovery of Supernova H0pe provides a potential way to resolve this conundrum over the expanding Universe, and perhaps future observations of multiply lensed supernovae, which JWST should be outstanding at finding, will be just what we need to resolve the so-called “Hubble tension.”
Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, and J. Lee (NOIRLab), A. Pagan (STScI)
9.) Dusty secrets within spiral galaxies. Most of the images we see of spiral galaxies are taken in visible light, where the stars shine brightly but where neutral matter, particularly dust grains, appear dark, blocking that light. Not so with JWST’s MIRI instrument, which highlights and illuminates the dust inside these galaxies, showing the locations of future and current new star-formation. In this view of galaxy NGC 7496, not only are the dust lanes prominently revealed, along with the pinkish-white regions showcasing regions where new stars are already forming, but the center of the galaxy exhibits brilliant diffraction spikes: evidence for an actively feeding supermassive black hole at the galaxy’s center.
Credit: ESA/Webb, NASA, CSA, M. Barlow, N. Cox, R. Wesson; Animation: E. Siegel
10.) The Ring Nebula. Viewed with both the NIRCam and MIRI instruments independently, this nebula is among the most famous planetary nebulae known: what’s left behind when a dying, Sun-like star blows off its outer layers in its death throes, while its core contracts down to form a white dwarf. You can find, in both views, intricate details of the inner filaments, which are actively being evaporated away by radiation, as well as roughly 10 concentric arcs outside of the main ring feature that are hydrocarbon-rich in the MIRI image. No other observatory has ever revealed this level of detail inside the Ring Nebula.
Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, Matthew Tiscareno (SETI Institute), Matthew Hedman (University of Idaho), Maryame El Moutamid (Cornell University), Mark Showalter (SETI Institute), Leigh Fletcher (University of Leicester), Heidi Hammel (AURA); Processing: Joseph Pasquale (STScI)
11.) JWST’s stunning view of Saturn’s rings. What shines brighter than Saturn, according to JWST’s eyes? Why, Saturn’s rings of course. Whereas Saturn itself is a relatively cool planet with a cloud-and-haze rich atmosphere separated into bands by latitude, it’s mostly very faint in infrared light. However, its rings are 99.9% composed of water-ice, which is even more reflective in infrared light than in visible light, leading to this unique and stunning view of Saturn’s rings. In this image from JWST, the A, B, C, and F rings are all visible, as are the Cassini division and the Encke gap. Saturn was the final gas giant planet in our Solar System imaged by JWST, completing our Solar System’s family portrait.
12.) Uranus, new and improved. Although JWST caught its first view of Uranus in February of 2023, the data it acquired on September 4, 2023 shows a far more spectacular view. 9 of its 13 inner moons, plus all five of its main large moons, are all revealed, as are at least five of its rings along with several features on the planet itself: a dense polar cap that fades away toward equatorial latitudes, punctuated by a dark band and with Uranian storms ranging closer to the equator. As Uranus approaches its solstice for the first time since 1986, these JWST views teach us information that no other observatory can reveal.
Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI; Annotation: E. Siegel
13.) A cosmic sparkler. Although this shows a portion of the very first science image released by JWST, it wasn’t until January of 2023 that this remarkable feature, known as the Sparkler galaxy, was discovered in JWST data. In the yellow boxes, shown above, are three images of the same distant galaxy, lensed, stretched, and magnified by the gravity of foreground cluster, SMACS 0723. The “sparkles” that are most easily visible in the largest, central image are actually globular clusters that are brightly undergoing new episodes of star-formation. When JWST examined these clusters in detail, it found that they already had older populations of stars inside, shedding new light on how “second bursts” of star-formation can occur inside globular clusters: a feature that only a fraction of all known globular clusters possess.
Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, A. Gáspár (University of Arizona) et al., Nature Astronomy, 2023
14.) An intermediate belt surprise. We’ve often looked at our Solar System as the prototype for what we expect to find elsewhere in the Universe. While planets can exist both close to and far from a star, we expect there to be a series of frost lines, with the innermost one corresponding to an asteroid belt and the outermost one corresponding to a Kuiper belt. Yet, when JWST examined the young stellar system Fomalhaut, it found something our Solar System doesn’t possess: an intermediate belt, found exterior to the inner disk where the asteroid belt should be, but interior to the Kuiper belt analogue. Is this feature typical of stellar systems, meaning we’re the outlier, or is it unusual, meaning it’s the outlier? More data is needed, but this is a puzzle we didn’t even know would need to be solved prior to 2023.
15.) The most distant galaxy cluster ever. Earlier in 2023, scientists spectroscopically analyzed a series of distant, very red, faint, galaxies found in the field-of-view behind Pandora’s cluster: Abell 2744. They found that at least seven of these galaxies are at precisely the same redshift, indicating the presence of a proto-galaxy cluster, the earliest one ever found at just 650 million years after the Big Bang. While Hubble had found the earliest proto-galaxy cluster previously known, at 800 million years after the Big Bang, and the CEERS collaboration found one just 1.2 billion years after the Big Bang, this cluster, with a mouthful of a name of A2744z7p9OD, was discovered by the GLASS collaboration, showcasing the importance of viewing many different areas of the sky in the quest for the most distant classes of objects of all.
These 15 images represent just a tiny fraction of the views and science that have come out of JWST, and the best part is we likely have another 20 years of excellent JWST science to look forward to. The great cosmic story, and our understanding of it, is in many ways only beginning to be unfolded.
Reports that the James Webb Space Telescope killed the reigning cosmological model turn out to have been exaggerated. But astronomers still have much to learn from distant galaxies glimpsed by Webb.
The Webb telescope has spotted galaxies surprisingly far away in space and deep in the past. These four, studied by a team called JADES, are all seen as they appeared less than 500 million years after the Big Bang.
Introduction
The cracks in cosmology were supposed to take a while to appear. But when the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) opened its lens last spring, extremely distant yet very bright galaxies immediately shone into the telescope’s field of view. “They were just so stupidly bright, and they just stood out,” said Rohan Naidu, an astronomer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
The galaxies’ apparent distances from Earth suggested that they formed much earlier in the history of the universe than anyone anticipated. (The farther away something is, the longer ago its light flared forth.) Doubts swirled, but in December, astronomers confirmed that some of the galaxies are indeed as distant, and therefore as primordial, as they seem. The earliest of those confirmed galaxies shed its light 330 million years after the Big Bang, making it the new record-holder for the earliest known structure in the universe. That galaxy was rather dim, but other candidates loosely pegged to the same time period were already shining bright, meaning they were potentially humongous.
How could stars ignite inside superheated clouds of gas so soon after the Big Bang? How could they hastily weave themselves into such huge gravitationally bound structures? Finding such big, bright, early galaxies seems akin to finding a fossilized rabbit in Precambrian strata. “There are no big things at early times. It takes a while to get to big things,” said Mike Boylan-Kolchin, a theoretical physicist at the University of Texas, Austin.
Astronomers began asking whether the profusion of early big things defies the current understanding of the cosmos. Some researchers and media outlets claimed that the telescope’s observations were breaking the standard model of cosmology — a well-tested set of equations called the lambda cold dark matter, or ΛCDM, model — thrillingly pointing to new cosmic ingredients or governing laws. It has since become clear, however, that the ΛCDM model is resilient. Instead of forcing researchers to rewrite the rules of cosmology, the JWST findings have astronomers rethinking how galaxies are made, especially in the cosmic beginning. The telescope has not yet broken cosmology, but that doesn’t mean the case of the too-early galaxies will turn out to be anything but epochal.
Simpler Times
To see why the detection of very early, bright galaxies is surprising, it helps to understand what cosmologists know — or think they know — about the universe.
After the Big Bang, the infant universe began cooling off. Within a few million years, the roiling plasma that filled space settled down, and electrons, protons and neutrons combined into atoms, mostly neutral hydrogen. Things were quiet and dark for a period of uncertain duration known as the cosmic dark ages. Then something happened.
Most of the material that flew apart after the Big Bang is made of something we can’t see, called dark matter. It has exerted a powerful influence over the cosmos, especially at first. In the standard picture, cold dark matter (a term that means invisible, slow-moving particles) was flung about the cosmos indiscriminately. In some areas its distribution was denser, and in these regions it began collapsing into clumps. Visible matter, meaning atoms, clustered around the clumps of dark matter. As the atoms cooled off as well, they eventually condensed, and the first stars were born. These new sources of radiation recharged the neutral hydrogen that filled the universe during the so-called epoch of reionization. Through gravity, larger and more complex structures grew, building a vast cosmic web of galaxies.
Astronomers with the CEERS survey, who are using the James Webb Space Telescope to study the early universe, look at a mosaic of images from the telescope in a visualization lab at the University of Texas, Austin.Nolan Zunk/University of Texas at Austin
Introduction
Meanwhile, everything kept flying apart. The astronomer Edwin Hubble figured out in the 1920s that the universe is expanding, and in the late 1990s, his namesake, the Hubble Space Telescope, found evidence that the expansion is accelerating. Think of the universe as a loaf of raisin bread. It starts as a mixture of flour, water, yeast and raisins. When you combine these ingredients, the yeast begins respiring and the loaf begins to rise. The raisins within it — stand-ins for galaxies — stretch further apart from one another as the loaf expands.
The Hubble telescope saw that the loaf is rising ever faster. The raisins are flying apart at a rate that defies their gravitational attraction. This acceleration appears to be driven by the repulsive energy of space itself — so-called dark energy, which is represented by the Greek letter Λ (pronounced “lambda”). Plug values for Λ, cold dark matter, and regular matter and radiation into the equations of Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity, and you get a model of how the universe evolves. This “lambda cold dark matter” (ΛCDM) model matches almost all observations of the cosmos.
One way to test this picture is by looking at very distant galaxies — equivalent to looking back in time to the first few hundred million years after the tremendous clap that started it all. The cosmos was simpler then, its evolution easier to compare against predictions.
Astronomers first tried to see the earliest structures of the universe using the Hubble telescope in 1995. Over 10 days, Hubble captured 342 exposures of an empty-looking patch of space in the Big Dipper. Astronomers were astonished by the abundance hiding in the inky dark: Hubble could see thousands of galaxies at different distances and stages of development, stretching back to much earlier times than anyone expected. Hubble would go on to find some exceedingly distant galaxies — in 2016, astronomers found its most distant one, called GN-z11, a faint smudge that they dated to 400 million years after the Big Bang.
That was surprisingly early for a galaxy, but it did not cast doubt on the ΛCDM model in part because the galaxy is tiny, with just 1% of the Milky Way’s mass, and in part because it stood alone. Astronomers needed a more powerful telescope to see whether GN-z11 was an oddball or part of a larger population of puzzlingly early galaxies, which could help determine whether we are missing a crucial piece of the ΛCDM recipe.
Unaccountably Distant
That next-generation space telescope, named for former NASA leader James Webb, launched on Christmas Day 2021. As soon as JWST was calibrated, light from early galaxies dripped into its sensitive electronics. Astronomers published a flood of papers describing what they saw.
The James Webb Space Telescope, a joint venture of space agencies in the United States, Europe and Canada that took decades to design, build and test, was launched into space on December 25, 2021.Northrop Grumman
Introduction
Researchers use a version of the Doppler effect to gauge the distances of objects. This is similar to figuring out the location of an ambulance based on its siren: The siren sounds higher in pitch as it approaches and then lower as it recedes. The farther away a galaxy is, the faster it moves away from us, and so its light stretches to longer wavelengths and appears redder. The magnitude of this “redshift” is expressed as z, where a given value for z tells you how long an object’s light must have traveled to reach us.
One of the first papers on JWST data came from Naidu, the MIT astronomer, and his colleagues, whose search algorithm flagged a galaxy that seemed inexplicably bright and unaccountably distant. Naidu dubbed it GLASS-z13, indicating its apparent distance at a redshift of 13 — further away than anything seen before. (The galaxy’s redshift was later revised down to 12.4, and it was renamed GLASS-z12.) Other astronomers working on the various sets of JWST observations were reporting redshift values from 11 to 20, including one galaxy called CEERS-1749 or CR2-z17-1, whose light appears to have left it 13.7 billion years ago, just 220 million years after the Big Bang — barely an eyeblink after the beginning of cosmic time.
These putative detections suggested that the neat story known as ΛCDM might be incomplete. Somehow, galaxies grew huge right away. “In the early universe, you don’t expect to see massive galaxies. They haven’t had time to form that many stars, and they haven’t merged together,” said Chris Lovell, an astrophysicist at the University of Portsmouth in England. Indeed, in a study published in November, researchers analyzed computer simulations of universes governed by the ΛCDM model and found that JWST’s early, bright galaxies were an order of magnitude heavier than the ones that formed concurrently in the simulations.
Some astronomers and media outlets claimed that JWST was breaking cosmology, but not everyone was convinced. One problem is that ΛCDM’s predictions aren’t always clear-cut. While dark matter and dark energy are simple, visible matter has complex interactions and behaviors, and nobody knows exactly what went down in the first years after the Big Bang; those frenetic early times must be approximated in computer simulations. The other problem is that it’s hard to tell exactly how far away galaxies are.
In the months since the first papers, the ages of some of the alleged high-redshift galaxies have been reconsidered. Some were demoted to later stages of cosmic evolution because of updated telescope calibrations. CEERS-1749 is found in a region of the sky containing a cluster of galaxies whose light was emitted 12.4 billion years ago, and Naidu says it’s possible the galaxy is actually part of this cluster — a nearer interloper that might be filled with dust that makes it appear more redshifted than it is. According to Naidu, CEERS-1749 is weird no matter how far away it is. “It would be a new type of galaxy that we did not know of: a very low-mass, tiny galaxy that has somehow built up a lot of dust in it, which is something we traditionally do not expect,” he said. “There might just be these new types of objects that are confounding our searches for the very distant galaxies.”
The Lyman Break
Everyone knew that the most definitive distance estimates would require JWST’s most powerful capability.
JWST not only observes starlight through photometry, or measuring brightness, but also through spectroscopy, or measuring the light’s wavelengths. If a photometric observation is like a picture of a face in a crowd, then a spectroscopic observation is like a DNA test that can tell an individual’s family history. Naidu and others who found large early galaxies measured redshift using brightness-derived measurements — essentially looking at faces in the crowd using a really good camera. That method is far from airtight. (At a January meeting of the American Astronomical Society, astronomers quipped that maybe half of the early galaxies observed with photometry alone will turn out to be accurately measured.)
But in early December, cosmologists announced that they had combined both methods for four galaxies. The JWST Advanced Deep Extragalactic Survey (JADES) team searched for galaxies whose infrared light spectrum abruptly cuts off at a critical wavelength known as the Lyman break. This break occurs because hydrogen floating in the space between galaxies absorbs light. Because of the continuing expansion of the universe — the ever-rising raisin loaf — the light of distant galaxies is shifted, so the wavelength of that abrupt break shifts too. When a galaxy’s light appears to drop off at longer wavelengths, it is more distant. JADES identified spectra with redshifts up to 13.2, meaning the galaxy’s light was emitted 13.4 billion years ago.
As soon as the data was downlinked, JADES researchers began “freaking out” in a shared Slack group, according to Kevin Hainline, an astronomer at the University of Arizona. “It was like, ‘Oh my God, oh my God, we did it we did it we did it!’” he said. “These spectra are just the beginning of what I think is going to be astronomy-changing science.”
Brant Robertson, a JADES astronomer at the University of California, Santa Cruz, says the findings show that the early universe changed rapidly in its first billion years, with galaxies evolving 10 times quicker than they do today. It’s similar to how “a hummingbird is a small creature,” he said, “but its heart beats so quickly that it is living kind of a different life than other creatures. The heartbeat of these galaxies is happening on a much more rapid timescale than something the size of the Milky Way.”
But were their hearts beating too fast for ΛCDM to explain?
Theoretical Possibilities
As astronomers and the public gaped at JWST images, researchers started working behind the scenes to determine whether the galaxies blinking into our view really upend ΛCDM or just help nail down the numbers we should plug into its equations.
One important yet poorly understood number concerns the masses of the earliest galaxies. Cosmologists try to determine their masses in order to tell whether they match ΛCDM’s predicted timeline of galaxy growth.
A galaxy’s mass is derived from its brightness. But Megan Donahue, an astrophysicist at Michigan State University, says that at best, the relationship between mass and brightness is an educated guess, based on assumptions gleaned from known stars and well-studied galaxies.
One key assumption is that stars always form within a certain statistical range of masses, called the initial mass function (IMF). This IMF parameter is crucial for gleaning a galaxy’s mass from measurements of its brightness, because hot, blue, heavy stars produce more light, while the majority of a galaxy’s mass is typically locked up in cool, red, small stars.
But it’s possible that the IMF was different in the early universe. If so, JWST’s early galaxies might not be as heavy as their brightness suggests; they might be bright but light. This possibility causes headaches, because changing this basic input to the ΛCDM model could give you almost any answer you want. Lovell says some astronomers consider fiddling with the IMF “the domain of the wicked.”
Introduction
“If we don’t understand the initial mass function, then understanding galaxies at high redshift is really a challenge,” said Wendy Freedman, an astrophysicist at the University of Chicago. Her team is working on observations and computer simulations that will help pin down the IMF in different environments.
Over the course of the fall, many experts came to suspect that tweaks to the IMF and other factors could be enough to square the very ancient galaxies lighting upon JWST’s instruments with ΛCDM. “I think it’s actually more likely that we can accommodate these observations within the standard paradigm,” said Rachel Somerville, an astrophysicist at the Flatiron Institute (which, like Quanta Magazine, is funded by the Simons Foundation). In that case, she said, “what we learn is: How fast can [dark matter] halos collect the gas? How fast can we make the gas cool off and get dense, and make stars? Maybe that happens faster in the early universe; maybe the gas is denser; maybe somehow it is flowing in faster. I think we’re still learning about those processes.”
Somerville also studies the possibility that black holes interfered with the baby cosmos. Astronomers have noticed a few glowing supermassive black holes at a redshift of 6 or 7, about a billion years after the Big Bang. It is hard to conceive of how, by that time, stars could have formed, died and then collapsed into black holes that ate everything surrounding them and began spewing radiation.
But if there are black holes inside the putative early galaxies, that could explain why the galaxies seem so bright, even if they’re not actually very massive, Somerville said.
Confirmation that ΛCDM can accommodate at least some of JWST’s early galaxies arrived the day before Christmas. Astronomers led by Benjamin Keller at the University of Memphis checked a handful of major supercomputer simulations of ΛCDM universes and found that the simulations could produce galaxies as heavy as the four that were spectroscopically studied by the JADES team. (These four are, notably, smaller and dimmer than other purported early galaxies such as GLASS-z12.) In the team’s analysis, all the simulations yielded galaxies the size of the JADES findings at a redshift of 10. One simulation could create such galaxies at a redshift of 13, the same as what JADES saw, and two others could build the galaxies at an even higher redshift. None of the JADES galaxies was in tension with the current ΛCDM paradigm, Keller and colleagues reported on the preprint server arxiv.org on December 24.
Though they lack the heft to break the prevailing cosmological model, the JADES galaxies have other special characteristics. Hainline said their stars seem unpolluted by metals from previously exploded stars. This could mean they are Population III stars — the avidly sought first generation of stars to ever ignite — and that they may be contributing to the reionization of the universe. If this is true, then JWST has already peered back to the mysterious period when the universe was set on its present course.
Extraordinary Evidence
Spectroscopic confirmation of additional early galaxies could come this spring, depending on how JWST’s time allocation committee divvies things up. An observing campaign called WDEEP will specifically search for galaxies from less than 300 million years after the Big Bang. As researchers confirm more galaxies’ distances and get better at estimating their masses, they’ll help settle ΛCDM’s fate.
Many other observations are already underway that could change the picture for ΛCDM. Freedman, who is studying the initial mass function, was up at 1 a.m. one night downloading JWST data on variable stars that she uses as “standard candles” for measuring distances and ages. Those measurements could help shake out another potential problem with ΛCDM, known as the Hubble tension. The problem is that the universe currently seems to be expanding faster than ΛCDM predicts for a 13.8-billion-year-old universe. Cosmologists have plenty of possible explanations. Perhaps, some cosmologists speculate, the density of the dark energy that’s accelerating the expansion of the universe is not constant, as in ΛCDM, but changes over time. Changing the expansion history of the universe might not only resolve the Hubble tension but also revise calculations of the age of the universe at a given redshift. JWST might be seeing an early galaxy as it appeared, say, 500 million years after the Big Bang rather than 300 million. Then even the heaviest putative early galaxies in JWST’s mirrors would have had plenty of time to coalesce, says Somerville.
Astronomers run out of superlatives when they talk about JWST’s early galaxy results. They pepper their conversations with laughter, expletives and exclamations, even as they remind themselves of Carl Sagan’s adage, however overused, that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. They can’t wait to get their hands on more images and spectra, which will help them hone or tweak their models. “Those are the best problems,” said Boylan-Kolchin, “because no matter what you get, the answer is interesting.”
The far-seeing observatory has served up revelations from the most distant reaches of the Universe to a moon orbiting Saturn.
Part of the dwarf galaxy Wolf–Lundmark–Melotte (WLM) captured by the James Webb Space Telescope’s Near-Infrared Camera.Credit: Science: NASA, ESA, CSA, Kristen McQuinn (RU), Image Processing: Zolt G. Levay (STScI)
The crowd in the auditorium began murmuring, then gasping, as Emma Curtis-Lake put her slides up on the screen. “Amazing!” someone blurted out.
Curtis-Lake, an astronomer at the University of Hertfordshire in Hatfield, UK, was showing off some of the first results on distant galaxies from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). It was not the last time astronomers started chattering in excitement this week as they gazed at the telescope’s initial discoveries, at a symposium held at the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore, Maryland.
In just its first few months of science operations, JWST has delivered stunning insights on heavenly bodies ranging from planets in the Solar System to stars elsewhere in the cosmos. These discoveries have sharpened researchers’ eagerness to take more advantage of the observatory’s capabilities. Scientists are now crafting new proposals for what the telescope should do in its second year, even as they scramble for funding and debate whether the telescope’s data should be fully open-access.
But it works — and spectacularly so. “I feel really lucky to be alive as a scientist to work with this amazing telescope,” says Laura Kreidberg, an astronomer at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg, Germany.JWST spots some of the most distant galaxies ever seen
First out of the floodgate, in July, came a rush of preprints on the early evolution of galaxies. The expansion of the Universe has stretched distant galaxies’ light to infrared, the wavelengths that JWST captures. That allows the telescope to observe faraway galaxies — including several so distant that they appear as they did just 350 million to 400 million years after the Big Bang, which happened 13.8 billion years ago.
Many early galaxies spotted by JWST are brighter, more diverse and better formed than astronomers had anticipated. “It seems like the early Universe was a very profound galaxy-maker,” says Steven Finkelstein, an astronomer at the University of Texas at Austin.
Some of these initial findings are being revised as data calibrations improve, and many of the early claims about distant galaxies await confirmation by spectroscopic studies of the galaxies’ light. But astronomers including Curtis-Lake announced on 9 December that they have already nailed spectroscopic confirmation of two galaxies that are farther away than any ever previously confirmed.
’Mindblowing’ detail
In closer regions of the cosmos, JWST is yielding results on star formation and evolution, thanks to its sharp resolution and infrared vision. “Compared to what we can see with Hubble, the amount of details that you see in the Universe, it’s completely mind-blowing,” says Lamiya Mowla, an astronomer at the University of Toronto in Canada. She and her colleagues were able to spot bright ‘sparkles’ around a galaxy that they dubbed the Sparkler; these turned out to be some of the oldest star clusters ever discovered. Other studies have unveiled details such as the hearts of galaxies where monster black holes lurk.
For instance, when scientists saw the first JWST data from the exoplanet WASP-39b, signals from a range of compounds, such as water, leapt right out. “Just looking at it was like, all the answers were in front of us,” says Mercedes López-Morales, an astronomer at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Now scientists are keenly anticipating data about other planets, including the seven Earth-sized worlds that orbit the star TRAPPIST-1. Early results on two of the TRAPPIST-1 planets, reported at the symposium, suggest that JWST is more than capable of finding atmospheres there, although the observations will take more time to analyse.
JWST has even made its first planet discovery: a rocky Earth-sized planet that orbits a nearby cool star, Kevin Stevenson at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland, told the meeting.
The telescope has also proved its worth for studying objects in Earth’s celestial neighbourhood. At the symposium, astronomer Geronimo Villanueva at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, showed new images of Saturn’s moon Enceladus. Scientists knew that Enceladus has a buried ocean whose water sometimes squirts out of fractures in its icy crust, but JWST revealed that the water plume envelops the entire moon and spreads well beyond. Separately, engineers have also figured out a way to get JWST to track rapidly moving objects, such as Solar System planets, much better than expected. That led to new studies such as observations of the DART spacecraft’s deliberate crash into an asteroid in September, says Naomi Rowe-Gurney, an astronomer also at Goddard.Fresh images reveal fireworks when NASA spacecraft ploughed into asteroid
Yet all these discoveries are but a taste of what JWST could ultimately do to change astronomy. “It’s premature to really have a full picture of its ultimate impact,” says Klaus Pontoppidan, JWST project scientist at STScI. Researchers have just begun to recognize JWST’s powers, such as its ability to probe details in the spectra of light from astronomical objects.
Applications are now open for astronomers to pitch their ideas for observations during JWST’s second year of operations, which starts in July. The next round could result in more ambitious or creative proposals to use the telescope now that astronomers know what it is capable of, Pontoppidan says.
Amid all the good news, there are still glitches. Primary among them is a lack of funding to support scientists working on JWST data, says López-Morales. “We can do the science, we have the skills, we are developing the tools, we are going to make groundbreaking discoveries but on a very thin budget,” she says. “Which is not ideal right now.”
Available to all?
López-Morales chairs a committee that represents astronomers who use JWST, and their to-do list is long. It includes surveying scientists about whether all of the telescope’s data should be freely available as soon as it is collected — a move that many say would disadvantage early-career scientists and those at smaller institutions who do not have the resources to pounce on and analyse JWST data right away. Telescope operators are also working on a way to get its data to flow more efficiently to Earth through communication dishes, and to fly it in a physical orientation that reduces the risk of micro-meteoroids smashing into and damaging its primary mirror.
But overall, the telescope is opening up completely new realms of astronomy, says Rowe-Gurney: “It’s the thing that’s going to answer all the questions that my PhD was trying to find.”
ARYAN'S BLOG 