NASA has new eyes on the universe.
The launch and subsequent operation of the James Webb Space Telescope (Webb or JWST) is one of the most exciting scientific events in decades. But while this first year of operation is just the beginning for the telescope, it has already contributed to many scientific discoveries.
Related: The best images of all time from the James Webb Space Telescope
Below are 12 of Webb’s major scientific breakthroughs.
1. JWST hailed as the best scientific breakthrough of 2022
An illustration of NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope fully deployed in space. (Image credit: NASA/Adriana Manrique Gutierrez)
When Webb launched on Christmas Day 2021, it was the culmination of decades of work by NASA scientists and engineers. The launch went smoothly, as did the many steps in the telescope’s deployment in the following months. In mid-July, Webb released his stunning first images. The infrared telescope will help us see almost every part of our universe in greater detail, including the most distant galaxies, and allow us to see into the past.
“In a few days of [the telescope] Coming online in late June 2022, researchers began discovering thousands of new galaxies that are more distant and older than any previously documented, some perhaps more than 150 million years older than the oldest identified by Hubble,” they write the editors of Science magazine in one statement (opens in a new tab). The newspaper named Webb as its scientific breakthrough of 2022, while Nature magazine chose Jane Rigby, Webb’s operations project scientist, to include in its list of “10 people who helped shape science stories” for in 2022.
“In addition, the telescope is able to collect enough light from astronomical objects, ranging from nascent stars to exoplanets, to reveal what they are made of and how they move through space,” wrote the editors of Science. “These data have already begun to reveal the atmospheric composition of planets hundreds of light-years from Earth in great detail, offering clues about their ability to support life as we know it.”
2. Stars born in the Pillars of Creation
James Webb Space Telescope view of the “Pillars of Creation” in the Eagle Nebula. (Image credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, J. DePasquale (STScI), A. Pagan (STScI))
The Pillars of Creation in the Eagle Nebula have long been one of the Hubble Space Telescope’s most iconic images. But while the telescope, which detects mostly visible light, captured the structure’s impressive clouds, the “creation” that took place within them was obscured. Now, Webb’s infrared imager has done just that capture in the form of numerous protostars. Appearing as tiny red dots against the smoky backdrop of the pillars, these collections of dust and gas, each many times larger than our solar system, are stars in the making.
“These young stars that we see in the image are not yet burning hydrogen,” Derek Ward-Thompson, head of the school of natural sciences at the University of Central Lancashire in the United Kingdom, told Space.com in October. “But little by little, as more and more material falls in, the middle gets denser and denser, and suddenly, it becomes so dense that hydrogen combustion is ignited, and suddenly its temperature rises to about 2 million degrees Celsius. [3.5 million degrees F].”
The image was created with different colors to represent mostly invisible infrared wavelengths, Anton Koekemoer, a research astronomer at the Baltimore Space Telescope Science Institute who assembled the image using data from Webb.
The only visible parts of the image appear blue; they would seem red to us. As the radiation increases in wavelength, so do the wavelengths of the colors, with red parts of the image, such as protostars, emitting radiation about six times the wavelength that a human eye can see . Images like this not only show off Webb’s capabilities as an infrared telescope, Ward-Thompson said, but could also help us understand how stars, including our sun, form.
3. Webb’s first direct image of an exoplanet
Webb’s first images of an alien world, HIP 65426b, are shown at the bottom of a wider image showing the planet’s host star. The images were taken at different wavelengths of infrared light. (Image credit: NASA/ESA/CSA, A Carter (UCSC), the ERS 1386 team, and A. Pagan (STScI).)
Scientists discovered the first exoplanets in the 1990s, and today there are more than 3,000 known worlds orbiting distant stars. Even so, only about two dozen of these have been directly photographed. Most exoplanets are so far away that they can only be detected through a dip in the light of the star they are orbiting, when that planet passes in front of its host star. But Webb could change that. In September, he captured his first live image of an exoplanet.
“This is a transformative moment, not only for Webb, but for astronomy in general,” said Sasha Hinkley, an astronomer at the University of Exeter in the United Kingdom who led these observations, in a statement (opens a new tab) in September.
The planet, called HIP 65426 b, was discovered in 2017. To see it, scientists used two of Webb’s cameras, several filters and the telescope’s coronagraphs, tools that block light from the central star . Along with the telescope’s exceptional sensitivity, the planet has several features that make it easy to observe. At 100 times the distance from our sun to Earth, this planet is much farther from its host star than any planet in our solar system (Pluto, by contrast, is only 40 times the sun-Earth distance from our sun). A colossal gas giant, it is also exceptionally large: about 12 times the size of Jupiter.
4. Re-images of the ghost galaxy
James Webb Space Telescope images of NGC 628 (the “Ghost Galaxy”) show bright dust in this citizen science image. (Image credit: NASA/ESA/CSA/Judy Schmidt)
Although the ghost galaxy is hard to find in the night sky, its glow is far from invisible, especially when captured in infrared with Webb. Hubble’s optical image of the galaxy, also called M74, shows the galaxy’s perfect spiral structure and star distribution, with arms extending outward from a radiating center. But a new Webb image reveals filament-like structures of heat-emitting dust and gas, emanating from a bright center rendered in vivid electric blue. The new image will shed light (infrared) on star-forming regions scattered throughout the galaxy’s spiral arms.
A fascinating composite image combining Hubble Space Telescope and Webb images presents aspects from both optical and infrared observations of the galaxy. European Space Agency (ESA) researchers helped create the composite image as part of an international project called PHANGS, according to ESA, which uses Webb, Hubble and several ground-based telescopes to capture 19 star-forming galaxies near infrared. ESA released a video in August to showcase the three images, as well as to compare them side-by-side.
“The addition of crystal-clear Webb observations at longer wavelengths will allow astronomers to identify star-forming regions in galaxies, precisely measure the masses and ages of star clusters, and gain information about the nature of the tiny dust grains traveling in interstellar space,” the ESA said.
5. Mysterious waves and shells surround the Wolf-Rayet star
An image of WR140 from the James Webb Space Telescope shows concentric rings around a pair of massive stars. (Image credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, JPL-Caltech)
In July, Webb captured an image of a distant star, called a Wolf-Rayet star, that exhibited Webb’s signature diffraction pattern, an imaging artifact. But around the star, called WR140, is a pattern that looks just as unreal: a pattern of concentric ripple-like rings that are peculiarly shaped and slightly shell-like. Unlike the diffraction pattern, rings of unlikely shape are real features.
“The six-pointed blue structure is an artifact due to optical diffraction from the bright star WR140 in this #JWST MIRI image,” wrote Mark McCaughrean, James Webb Space Telescope Science Working Group interdisciplinary scientist and science advisor of the ESA. in a twitter thread. “But the curved but boxy red things are real, a series of shells around WR140. Actually, in space. Around a star.”
Wolf-Rayet stars are massive stars near the end of their lives, having already released much of their hydrogen into space. The oddly shaped rings are caused by the interaction between WR140 and its smaller companion star. The stars are surrounded by a cloud of dust sculpted into that shape by their companion star, McCaughrean said. Ryan Lau, an astronomer at NOIRlab in Arizona, led the team that studied these observations as part of the JWST Early Release Science program. In October, the team published a study on the observations in the journal Astronomy of nature (opens in a new tab).
6. Find the most distant galaxies ever
The region of the sky studied by the James Webb Advanced Deep Extragalactic Survey (JADES) space telescope. (Image credit: NASA, ESA, CSA and M. Zamani (ESA/Webb). Science: B. Robertson (UCSC), S. Tacchella (Cambridge), E. Curtis-Lake (Hertfordshire), S. Carniani ( Scuola) Normale Superiore), and the JADES Collaboration.)
Webb was forced to observe the most distant galaxies in the universe, and in mid-December scientists confirmed that they had done just that. The telescope has officially observed the four most distant galaxies known, which also means they are the oldest. Webb observed the galaxies as they appeared about 13.4 billion years ago, when the universe was only 350 million years old, about 2% of its current age.
Scientists suspected that the four galaxies were incredibly old, like hundreds of others identified by Webb. As part of JWST’s Advanced Deep Extragalactic Survey (JADES), researchers confirmed their ages by analyzing data from the telescope’s Near Infrared Spectrograph to find out how fast the galaxies…