It was a $10 billion gift to the world. A machine that will show us our place in the universe.
James Webb Space Telescope launched exactly a year ago, on the day of Christmas. It had taken thirty years to plan, design and build.
Many have wondered if the successor to the famous Hubble Space Telescope will really live up to expectations.
We had to wait a few months while its epic 6.5m primary mirror was unpacked and focused, and its other systems were tested and calibrated.
But yes, it was everything they said would happen. American, European and Canadian space agencies held a party in July. to publish the first color images. What you see on this page are some of the later published images that you may have overlooked.
The first thing you should remember about James Webb is that he is an infrared telescope. He sees the sky in wavelengths of light beyond what our eyes can perceive.
Astronomers use their different cameras to explore regions of the cosmos, such as these large towers of gas and dust. The columns were Hubble’s favorite target. It would take you several years to travel at the speed of light to traverse this entire scene.
Carina Nebula
They call this scene the Cosmic Abyss. The edge of a huge, gaseous cavity within another dusty, star-forming nebula known as the carina.
The void was shaped by intense ultraviolet radiation and winds from hot, young stars.
It’s about 15 light-years from one end of this image to the other. One light-year is equivalent to about 9.46 trillion km (5.88 trillion miles).
Circle Galaxy
This large galaxy on the right was discovered in the 1940s by the great Swiss astronomer Fritz Zwicky. The complex circle structure is the result of a head-on collision with another galaxy. Its diameter is about 145,000 light years.
Planet Neptune
James Webb doesn’t just look into the deep Universe. It also explores objects in our own solar system. This jewel is the eighth planet from the Sun: Neptune seen with its rings. The small white dots surrounding it and the large “pointed star” above are also moons. This is Neptune’s largest moon, Triton. The nails are a work of the way James Webb’s mirror system was built.
Read more: Ringed Neptune captured by the James Webb telescope
Orion Nebula
Orion is one of the most familiar parts of the sky. A star-forming region or nebula about 1,350 light-years from Earth. Here, Webb paints a feature called the Orion Bar, a wall of dense gas and dust.
bimodal
In one of the big space stories of the year, Nasa crashed a spacecraft into an asteroid called Dimorphos to see if it was possible to deflect the path of the 160m-wide rock. It was a test of strategy to protect the world from threatening asteroids. James Webb caught a hail of 1,000 tons of debris ejected at the time of impact.
Read more: Asteroid deflection experiment powered by debris
WR-140
This was one of the most compelling Webb images of the year. “WR” stands for Wolf-Rayet. This is some kind of star, a massive star that is nearing the end of its life. Wolf-Rayets blasts huge gaseous winds into space. An invisible companion star in this image is compressing these winds to create dust. The dusty crusts you see span more than 10 trillion km. That’s 70,000 times the distance between Earth and our Sun.
Read more: Dusty star mystery solved by James Webb telescope
Ghost Galaxy
Nicknamed the Ghost Galaxy, the M74 is known for its flamboyant spiral arms. It stands almost directly in front of us and about 32 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Pisces, giving Webb an excellent view of these arms and their structures. The telescope’s detectors are particularly good at picking out all the fine filaments of gas and dust.
You can still hear Jonathan’s voice. Discovery program for the BBC World Service Webb where he discussed his project with leading scientists and engineers.
