Everything in space

By SIBYLLE ANDERL

Photo: NASA/ESA, AP

December 24, 2022 · The James Webb Telescope has been sending fantastic pictures to Earth for several months.

Our cosmos is even more beautiful than we thought.

Delicate rings of dust surrounding an ancient star like a tulle skirt.

Colorful gas clouds full of filaments and structures through which countless stars shine through.

Galaxies performing a tremendous gravitational dance with each other before they will one day have merged.

Our cosmos is even more beautiful and mysterious than we thought.

About 160,000 light-years away, the Tarantula Nebula in the Large Magellanic Cloud is home to many young massive stars.

Photo: NASA / ESA, dpa

That's the conclusion one has to come to when admiring the images from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) that have reached us since this summer.

The enthusiasm about the cosmic details that are constantly being discovered is mixed with astonishment about the technological achievement on which these pictures are based.

Because the JWST is a mission that is unique in its complexity.

It had to be folded origami-style for transport into space on a relatively slim Ariane 5 rocket.

And since, unlike the Hubble Space Telescope, which is in orbit around the Earth, it is stationed around 1.5 million kilometers from Earth, no hardware corrections were possible: everything had to work the first time.

Protostar L1527 is just emerging from its collapsing home cloud.

Not all matter ends up on the star - some is thrown out again in two outflows of mass.

Photo: NASA, ESA, CSA, and STScI, J. De

The spiral galaxy IC 5332, 29 million light-years away, appears somewhat spooky with its complex network of gas structures.

Photo: AP

The tension before the start on Christmas Day 2021 was enormous.

The relief was all the greater when the American space agency NASA reported on January 5, 2022: It worked!

The Space Telescope's tennis court-sized sunshield, made up of five separate sheets, had been successfully unfolded.

Three days later, the next success story came: the 6.5 meter large primary mirror had also been able to be opened.

Dying beautifully: An aging star sheds layers of gas and dust, creating the Southern Ring Nebula.

Photo: NASA/ESA, AFP

Jupiter's turbulent atmosphere is full of the finest detail - and there are auroras at the gas planet's poles.

Photo: NASA, ESA, Jupiter ERS Team;

image processing by Ricardo Hueso (UPV/EHU) and Judy Schmidt

Even the last skeptics began to believe that this $10 billion telescope, which had been plagued by repeated misfortunes before it was launched, could still be a success story.

Nobody doubts that anymore.

Because the images produced by the space telescope, which works primarily in the infrared range of the spectrum with four instruments, show our cosmos in a depth and sharpness of detail that even the optimists among the supporters of the project would hardly have thought possible.

The "Pillars of Creation" in the Eagle Nebula, 6,500 light-years away, appear translucently fragile at the wavelengths recorded by the James Webb Telescope compared to earlier images.

Many young stars are formed here, which radiate and stir up gas and dust in their surroundings.

Photo: NASA/ESA

The first plans for NASA's new mega-project, in which the European Space Agency ESA and the Canadian Space Agency CSA are also involved today, were already presented at the turn of the millennium.

At the time, the Hubble Space Telescope had just launched, and it was clear that that would not be enough for some scientific questions.

Hubble reached its limits in particular when observing the first generation of stars and galaxies in the cosmos.

JWST should fill this gap.

Years of cost explosion followed for the project with more and more delays.

At the same time, however, the scientific task for the mission became ever broader: in addition to the early stars and galaxies, the atmospheres of distant planets in particular were added as desired observation objects.

Could some of the distant planets be of such a nature that they could support the emergence of life?

We now know thousands of them, and the question arises again and again as to whether the conditions on some of them might be such that they favor the emergence of alien life.

To answer that question one needs to know the chemical composition of the atmospheres, and James Webb is here to help too.

But astronomers are also hoping for crucial clues to help them understand how stars form and develop, and how galaxies continue to develop.

The fact that James Webb's pictures also look so pretty is a nice bonus given the scientific motivation - for astronomers and everyone else.


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