The Incredible Impact of the James Webb Telescope
NASA released the first coloured image from the James Webb space telescope on the twelfth of July 2022 and it is the deepest image of the infrared universe. What you see in the photo look like a couple bright stars but then the rest of the image is filled with thousands and thousands of faint galaxies! If you hold a grain of sand at arm's length with the sky as the background, this image is equivalent to that portion of the sky, so such a small aperture has captured millions of galaxies, and all of this is light captured many billions of years ago, so we are technically looking into the past. And the curve of light that you see (although you are taught that light travels in straight lines) is due to the heavy mass of the galaxies, leading to the curvature of space-time and hence causing gravitational lensing, which magnifies the distant galaxies more clearly. This photo is a massive update to the pre-existing Hubble deep field. The very fact that a lot of galaxies were captured in the infrared spectrum supports the idea of redshift and Hubble's law and in turn the Big Bang Theory! It is an astounding leap forward in our capacity to study and inspect the enormousness of the cosmos and is expected to bring a transformative change in our understanding of the universe!
Credits: NASA, ESA, CSA, and STScI
Most recently, a picture of the Wolf-Rayet star was taken. These stars have huge masses (more than 25 times the mass of the Sun). While they are ejecting material at a very high rate, they also have very short lifespans (fewer than a few hundred thousand years as opposed to the sun, which has a lifespan of approximately 10 billion years). In fact, there is a huge amount of material that has been ejected into the universe, which cools and forms infrared-emitting dust. This dust was observed by the telescope because it glows in the infrared wavelength. Through the use of this image, we are able to gain a better understanding of the origins of cosmic dust that can survive a supernova and turn into planets and stars, along with life as we know it.
Credits: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Webb ERO Production Team