“Somewhere something incredible is waiting to be known!” NASA administrator Bill Nelson aptly quoted these words of Carl Sagan at a worldwide online event organised to release the first science images sent home by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). Whether this incredible revelation will have to do with the birth of stars; the most distant galaxies that formed within less than a billion years of the Big Bang; or the presence of biomarkers in the atmosphere of exoplanets (planets outside our solar system), only time can tell. The five images that were released were carefully selected, to align with the scientific goals of the mission, from about 700 pictures of the cosmos that JWST had collected soon after its launch on December 25, 2021.
In the order in which they were released, the five images were the following: a deep field picture in which the telescope gazed into a galaxy cluster that is about 13.1 billion light years away; a hot gaseous exoplanet that is about 1,000 light years away — a spectrum of its atmosphere which carried the chemical fingerprint of water vapour; a violent explosion that marked the death of a massive star, known as the Southern Ring; a group picture of five galaxies — Stephan’s Quintet, about 300 million light years away and a picture of Carina nebula, which is 7,600 light years away, showing crops of new stars being born.
Also read: NASA’s James Webb telescope beams first cosmic view of ‘deepest’ universe
