Scientists begin the countdown until July 12 with images of Webb. Launched in December 2021, the James Webb Space Telescope, the observatory, is ready to make sure it is ready for science.
Webb’s thin guide sensor (FGS) recently captured a vision of stars and galaxies that offers a fascinating insight into what the telescope’s scientific instruments will reveal in the coming weeks, months and years.
The resulting engineering test image is among the deepest images in the universe ever taken, representing very faint objects, and is now the deepest image of the infrared sky. The bright stars stand out with their six long, well-defined diffraction spikes. This was the effect of Webb’s six-sided mirror segments. Beyond the stars, galaxies fill almost the entire background.
The monochrome image is shown in false color with white-yellow-orange-red representing the progression from brightest to faintest. The brightest star (at 9.3 magnitudes) on the right edge is 2MASS 16235798 + 2826079. There are only a handful of stars in this image, which are distinguished by their diffraction peaks.
The rest of the objects are thousands of faint galaxies, some in the nearby universe but many more in the high-shifting universe toward red.
The test image was produced during a thermal stability test in mid-May. It has some rough qualities at the edges. The data was initially taken to test the extent to which the telescope could remain locked to a target. This indicates the power of the telescope.
In this image, the FGS image was acquired in parallel with the NIRCam image of the star HD147980 for eight days in early May. This image is the result of 32 hours of exposure time at different overlay points of the Guider 2 channel.
Because FGS does not use color filters when its aperture is open, unlike other scientific instruments, it is impossible to thoroughly examine the age of galaxies in this image. But FGS can still create stunning images of the cosmos when it captures unwanted images during a test.