I love space.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/19/science/webb-pillars-of-creation-image.html
“Pillars of Creation” captured in NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope’s near-infrared view. The pillars resemble arches and spires rising from a desert, but are filled with semitransparent gas and dust.NASA
Yes, it’s full of stars, and stars to be.
Twenty-seven years ago, in 1995, the Hubble Space Telescope wowed the world with a cosmic landscape called Pillars of Creation. The image revealed towering mountains of gas and dust in the Eagle Nebula, one of the most productive star factories in the Milky Way galaxy. It was high art from deep space and a visual triumph for the newly repaired and reborn Hubble, which had been marred by a blurred lens that prevented it from recording clearer scenes of the cosmos.
Now the James Webb Space Telescope, Hubble’s successor, has turned its infrared eyes to see through those same columns and inspect the newborns still in their dusty cribs. In the new view of the Pillars released on Wednesday, cherry-red streaks and waves are jets of material squeezed from globs of gas and dust — baby protostars — as they collapsed and heated up toward stardom.
After 20 years and some $10 billion the Webb telescope launched on Christmas Day last year into an orbit around the sun and a million miles from Earth. The launch was stupendously successful, as was the complex unfolding procedure in space that put the telescope into operational mode.
The Webb is designed to see infrared light, electromagnetic radiation with wavelengths longer than visible light — colors no human eye has ever seen. Viewing the cosmos in these wavelengths allows astronomers to see distant galaxies whose light has shifted into infrared with their motion away from Earth, and to peer though dust clouds that litter the lanes of interstellar space.
At left, the Pillars of Creation as revealed in visible light by the Hubble Space Telescope in 2014. At right, the new infrared view produced by the Webb telescope.NASA
The telescope has proved its worth. In the last few months it has dazzled astronomers with new views of a universe that they thought they knew: galaxies and stars at the edge of time, only a few hundred million years after the Big Bang; spooky pictures of planets like Neptune and Jupiter; delicate probes of the atmospheres of exoplanets that are possible lairs of alien life-forms; a view of detritus from a small asteroid just after the NASA DART spacecraft, practicing planetary defense, intentionally smashed into it; and cosmic landscapes like the Pillars of Creation or the cosmic cliffs of the Carina Nebula, emphasizing the immense scale and fragile drama of the cycles of creation and destruction that characterize the seasons of existence in our galaxy.
The Eagle Nebula is about 6,500 light-years from Earth and is in the constellation Serpens, from the Latin word for “serpent.” The nebula, known also as Messier 16, is starlight that can be barely glimpsed by the naked eye on clear evenings in July and August.
Enjoy it while you can: In a few million years, the nebula will be gone, evaporated by its fierce stellar progeny like a fleecy windblown cirrus cloud on a summer afternoon.
The new image was made with Webb’s Near Infrared Camera, or NIRCam. Astronomers said in a news release that the telescope’s observation would allow a better census of the nebula’s stars and their types, and thus improve their models and theories of how stars form, escape from their dusty crèches, die and pass on their substances to the future. Dust to dust, ashes to ashes.
Because of an editing error, an earlier version of this article misstated the origin of the name of the constellation Serpens. It is Latin, not ancient Greek.
Dennis Overbye joined The Times in 1998, and has been a reporter since 2001. He has written two books: “Lonely Hearts of the Cosmos: The Story of the Scientific Search for the Secret of the Universe” and “Einstein in Love: A Scientific Romance.” @overbye
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/07/12/james-webb-space-telescope-photos-explanation/
Opinion
Stop for a minute. These space images are worth your time.
Graphics columnist|Follow
July 12, 2022 at 6:38 p.m. EDT
This is a nebula — a giant cloud of gas and place where stars are born. It’s called Carina Nebula.
It would take about 12 years traveling at the speed of light to cross this area.
5,600 B.C.
The time shown in
the picture above.
Present
Jesus is born.
4 B.C.
U.S. signs
Declaration of
Independence.
1776 A.D.
Egyptians build
pyramids at Giza.
Around 2,500 B.C.
Bonkers, right?
Everything about the Webb telescope is mind-boggling. Ponder this: Humans sent a telescope the size of a tennis court into space and parked it four times farther away than the moon.
1 million miles
Webb
Earth
Moon
There it orbits the sun along with us, just so we can get some pictures.
Webb
Earth
Sun
Moon
Earth’s orbit
The very first Webb image made public showed thousands of galaxies as they appeared about 13 billion years ago — that’s almost as far back in time as the Big Bang itself:
Remember, most of the colored circles and smudges in this image are galaxies — not stars. Galaxies can contain billions of stars and planets. And the square above represents just a tiny speck of space — NASA compared it to the patch of sky that would be covered by a grain of sand held at arm’s length on the surface of the Earth.
About 13 billion years
The oldest point in the
image above.
Present
Dinosaurs
extinct
65 million
years ago
The Sun and
the Earth are formed
4.5 billion years
Big Bang
13.8 billion
years
The Big Bang itself is not something we’ll be able to see with the Webb telescope. But the images the telescope produces will help us learn when and how the first celestial objects were formed as the universe cooled.
To give you an idea of what the Webb can do, this is what we could see in the same region of sky before and after the Webb telescope.
The Webb will help us better understand much more than how galaxies form. The photo below shows how a star similar to our sun looks as it is dying:
As the star loses strength, it sheds its outer layers, creating a cloud of gas — the colorful ring surrounding the core. Such images will help us understand how dying stars spread atoms and molecules into space, and how that changes the chemistry of the universe.
With the Webb, we’ll also be able to see how stars are born. This image shows a group of five galaxies. Some of the galaxies are so close that they crash into each other, forming new stars. Younger stars are blue, older ones are red.
Finally, the Webb telescope allows scientists to collect data of the chemical composition of stars and planets outside our solar system. This kind of detailed information will ultimately help us look for signs of life elsewhere in our galaxy.
These stunning images are a major achievement for us Earthlings. And given everything absurd we’ve witnessed on Earth of late, they are more than that. If nothing else, the humongousness of the universe ought to put our problems into perspective. A little insignificance isn’t such a bad thing.
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