The James Webb Space Telescope promised to give us a mind-blowing view of the Universe.
And has it ever.
This week, the biggest and most powerful space telescope beamed its first snapshots of the cosmos to Earth.
The four images offer the most detailed glimpses of the Universe we've ever seen.
It's a visual feast of the early universe, cosmic cliffs, dying stars and battling galaxies.
Let's dive in and take a cosmic tour.
Our first stop is a deep dive back in time focusing on a large galaxy cluster known as SMACS 0723 in the constellation of Volans.
Packed into this tiny sliver of the Universe are thousands of galaxies of all shapes, sizes and ages lit up in a kaleidoscope of colours that correspond to different wavelengths of infrared light.
The striking image is much sharper and contains more detail than the Hubble image of the same patch of sky, says Karl Glazebrook of Swinburne University. "There's so much physics and astrophysics going on, it's hard to know where to start," Professor Glazebrook says.
But we would not be able to see such detail in this image without the help of SMACS 0723.
The mass of the cluster warps space and stretches light from more distant and older galaxies from the early universe as it travels towards us.
Think of this image as a 3D journey through space and time.
As the universe expands, it stretches the wavelengths of light coming from stars and galaxies further away so they appear redder in infrared light. Objects closer to us appear much lighter.
In the foreground, you can see bright, spiky stars from our own Milky Way.
The spikes you see are caused by the diffraction of light in the telescope's mirror, which is made up of 18 smaller hexagonal-shaped mirrors.
Then there are other galaxies further away, like this spiral galaxy out towards the edge of the image.
The group of galaxies that make up SMACS 0723 is even more distant. Light from these galaxies has taken 4.6 billion years to reach us. To put that in perspective, this is how the cluster appeared when our Solar System started to form.
The cluster has many large, fuzzy galaxies, like this one, which is right at its centre.
The giant red arcs stretching around the centre of these blobs are much more distant galaxies that have been magnified by the cluster.
The galaxies, like this spiral galaxy in the top right, have been stretched by the gravity of SMACS 0723.
And if you look closely, you'll see the same galaxy repeated in other parts of the image like here in the bottom left, because of the way light bends around SMACS 0723 on its way to us.
If we zoom in even further, things get really interesting.
Near the stretched galaxy is what looks like a pearl necklace.
"The beads are probably star clusters in a small compact galaxy," Professor Glazebrook says.
Zoom in even further and you can see more detail in the necklace.
"We are seeing a wide range of colours we haven't seen before in the early universe," Professor Glazebrook says.
The oldest galaxies, just specks of red, appear as they did just a few million years after the Big Bang — and may no longer even exist.
The colour and analysis of the wavelengths of molecules detected in light coming from this faint dot suggest this galaxy is around 13.1 billion years old.
That's just 700 million years after the Big Bang, but there may be galaxies that are even older in this image.
Welcome to the 'cosmic cliffs'
The next image you'll see is a region called the cosmic cliffs on the north-west edge of the bright Carina Nebula, or NGC 3324, located roughly 7,600 light-years away.
Astronomer Kim-Vy Tran from UNSW Sydney says before this image, telescopes weren't powerful enough to cut through the cocoon of dust that shrouded many newborn stars from view.
Dr Tran says the telescope is so sensitive it's like detecting the heat of a bumblebee as far away as the Moon.
It may look like the rugged, sparkling ranges of a giant cosmic mountain, but it's actually a billowing cloud of dust and gas giving birth to new stars.
This near-infrared image shows the violent inner workings of a stellar nursery. And those "peaks" you see are so tall they stretch several light-years high.
If we focus for a moment on the right-hand side of the image, we can see something interesting.
The cluster of bright dots in the orange dust is a pod of different-coloured stars forming. Their various colours and brightness tell us about their different masses.
"Many of them are going to be the mass of our Sun and smaller, and then a tiny handful of them will be even more massive than this," Dr Tran says.
These baby stars will follow in the footsteps of their grown-up siblings shining brightly above their dusty birthplace.
The colours of these stars are related to their temperature, with the bluish stars being the hottest.
Eventually, these stars become old enough to "leave home" and their intense ultraviolet radiation burns up the surrounding gas.
This carves out chunks of the orange dust cloud and creates pillars of "steam", like this one here.
Not only do these stars leave their nurseries behind, but they also "trash the room" on their way out. It's a real coming-of-age story.
To peer into the chaotic stellar nursery in even higher resolution, we need to look at it in longer wavelengths of infrared light.
It's hard to convey just how much more detail this image, which combines near-infrared and mid-infrared light, captures.
"With the Hubble Telescope, you could see the forest and the trees, and maybe some of the big branches of those trees. But with Webb … now you're able to see the small branches and even be able to tell the difference in the shapes of the leaves," Dr Tran says.
Here is the dust cloud again. Dr Tran says it could contain the first nuggets of planets.
"This stellar nursery is not just a nursery of stars, it's also a nursery of planets as well," she says. "You're looking at thousands if not millions of planets in this little patch of the sky."
Just as millions of stars are starting their lives, others are ending theirs
This image of the Southern Ring Nebula some 2,500 light years away shows a star taking its final breaths. The peanut-shaped region is known as a planetary nebula, which forms when dying stars throw off gas and dust.
The mid-infrared image below shows a small, dim star nestled next to its brighter, younger companion. The smaller one is the actual star that created the nebula.
In its glory days, this small star was once a red giant until it puffed up at the end of its life and shed most of its mass in a gentle wind.
The reddish hue of this small star indicates that it's cloaked in dust, making it barely visible in the next near-infrared image…
Its death has been slow-moving rather than sudden: it's been shedding gas and dust for thousands of years.
The stellar partners might look close, but the distance between the little star and its brighter partner is roughly a thousand times the distance between the Sun and Earth, says Professor De Marco. "They're minding their own business, they're kind of in a big, long orbit."
As the two stars dance around each other, they kick up dust and gas, creating ripples of material. The larger star's strong stellar wind also pushed the gas from its dying partner out, forming a bubble.
The foamy orange outer layers are molecular hydrogen illuminating the gas and dust ejected by the dying star.
Moving inwards, the vibrant blue haze is gas that's heated up by the burning remnants of the fading star.
Professor De Marco reads the image like a geologist uncovering Earth's history from rock layers. "The outer part is the stuff that came out first, and the inner part is in a sense what came out later," she says.
The fluffy outer edges also show rays of light from the central stars beaming through them, much like sunlight shining through holes in the clouds.
There's also a strange bright line in the far-left-hand corner of the nebula's edges that looks a bit like a jet. Except it's not a jet, it's an edge-on galaxy.
But stellar deaths can lead to new beginnings. The thrown-away gas from the nebula could travel for millions of years through space and seed the next generation of planets and stars.
"These stars are responsible for most of the carbon in the universe," Professor De Marco says. "This is not just carbon in the making, but carbon in the ejecting. If you don't eject it, it doesn't go to the next stars."
Battle of the galaxies
In addition to capturing the sparkling life cycle of stars, the James Webb Space Telescope also snapped a cosmic car crash in action.
And it never looked so beautiful.
This next image captures Stephan's Quintet — a group of five galaxies in the constellation Pegasus — in near-infrared and mid-infrared light.
The four galaxies on the right-hand side are roughly 290 million light-years away from Earth, while the interloper on the left is a mere 40 million light-years away.
"It's so nearby that we sort of have a ringside seat looking at this collision happening in front of our eyes," says Robin Cook, an astrophysicist at the University of Western Australia.
The right-side galaxies are locked into a head-to-head collision, with the NGC 7318 duo smashing into each other and becoming one.
"They're ripping into each other at high speed and swirling around one another," Dr Cook says.
As the four galaxies lock into each other, their violent interaction creates red-hot shock waves in the band of dust and gas.
You can also see wispy tails of gas, dust and stars being stripped away from the galaxies as their gravitational fields interact.
Crowning this galactic dance is NGC 7319, which is home to a supermassive black hole that's 24 million times the mass of the Sun.
The merging galaxies are likely feeding this hungry black hole with regular meals of gas and dust, Dr Cook says.
It's a different story for NGC 7320, which lives a relatively peaceful existence away from the starry battleground.
The galaxy's baby blue hues indicate that its stars are relatively young, perhaps forming in the last 100 million years.
Stripping back to mid-infrared only uncovers a treasure-trove of details.
The red specks uncover star-forming regions and older, distant galaxies or those shrouded in a blanket of dust.
The blue areas show star clusters and galaxies that are clear from dust.
And the green patches are rich in hydrocarbon molecules.
Dr Cook says the images will keep him and his colleagues busy for a good while.
"Scientists will be poring over this for months, dissecting each of these galaxies individually to understand them better."
Credits:
Special thanks to Karl Glazebrook (Swinburne University), Kim-Vy Tran (UNSW Sydney), Orsola De Marco (Macquarie University), and Robin Cook (University of Western Australia).
