Behold the first scientific images of the James Webb Telescope

(NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope / https://bit.ly/3O0X02q)

The wait is over and the emotion is palpable. The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) team has unveiled the first set of scientific data from the observatory.

The data includes images of a planetary nebula, a star-forming region, a compact group of galaxies, and a spectrum of the atmosphere of hot Saturn.

The JWST was launched last Christmas and a month later entered orbit around the second Lagrange (L2) point in the Sun-Earth system.

Yesterday, July 11, the observatory officially began its scientific program, and it was President Joe biden who presented the first scientific image that evening.

Now, July 12, the team in charge has published new scientific data including three images:

The planetary Nebula NGC 3132 "Southern Ring", which is the ejected outer gas shells of a star similar to the Sun.

At the center of the nebula is a white dwarf with a diameter almost half a light year, and the nebula is located about 2 thousand light years from the Sun.

The Carina Nebula, which is one of the largest star-forming regions in the Milky Way, is located 7.6 thousand light-years from the Sun in the constellation Carina.

This famous nebula contains many massive stars and open star clusters, including the famous superheavy binary system Eta Carina, surrounded by the Homunculus Nebula.

The Stephan's Quintet, a compact group of galaxies discovered in 1877, located at a distance of about 290 million light years from the Sun in the constellation Pegasus.

The Quintet consists of four galaxies, and the fifth is much closer to the Milky Way. Its image is only projected onto the group for the earthly observer.

The team also published the spectrum of the atmosphere of the exoplanet WASP-96 b, a cloudless hot Saturns that orbits a sun-like star in the constellation Phoenix, 980 light years from Earth

The atmosphere’s spectrum was obtained during the passage of the planet across the disk of its star

At this moment part of the star's radiation is absorbed by various elements in the planet's atmosphere, which makes it possible to judge the composition of the atmosphere.

Sources:

• ESA: https://esawebb.org/news/weic2210/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/ESA_Webb/status/1546877973730566146/photo/1

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