We already have the first official image of James Webb: this is SMACS 0723, the "most mysterious object" of all that the telescope has photographed

Today is the day. NASA just released the first official image from James Webb: a mind-boggling “photograph” of the cluster SMACS 0723, the deepest and sharpest infrared image ever taken of the early universe. But what we see is more than an image: it is confirmation that the James Webb is poised to change the way we see the cosmos.

The importance of these images is such that, despite the fact that NASA had announced that they would be made public on July 12, President Biden decided make a breakthrough himself. That is what we can see: the answer to the question of whether the 10,000 million dollars that we have invested in it have been worth it.

What are we watching?

The image that has been made public is of SMACS 0723. An area of ​​the Universe where a high number of galaxies generate a huge gravitational lens. The quality is truly exceptional: this is the deepest and sharpest infrared image ever taken of the early universe. And, in fact, not only is it a beautiful image, but it will shed light (and never better said) to what is surely the most mysterious object on the list of objects “photographed” by the Webb.

How has it been detected?

When we say that the James Webb is the largest and most complex space observatory ever built, it’s hard to know what we’re talking about. When we assure that it will help us understand the last 13 billion years of the history of the Universe, it remains something abstract and not very tangible. But if we say that its infrared sensors would be able to detect the heat generated by a bumblebee on the surface of the Moon, everything starts to get real. The James Webb is a monster capable of things that until very recently seemed like science fiction.

the webb is an infrared telescope. That is, their spectrographs are focused on wavelengths longer than the human eye can detect. The information that is in those wavelengths (information that telescopes like Hubble cannot access) is crucial for obtaining details about the very makeup of the cosmos.

But we are not talking about an infrared camera anymore, no. We talk about MIRI (Mid-Infrared Instrument), the most sophisticated instrument sent to space to work in the thermal infrared range (wavelengths from 5 to 28 microns).

This instrument unites an imaging camera, an integral field spectrograph and a coronagraph. Items ten to one hundred times more sensitive than the Spitzer telescope and an angular resolution of 8 times greater.

Because it is important?

“Webb is designed to be an incredibly powerful tool that will see the edge of the cosmos, the most distant galaxies, perhaps even the first stars to form,” explained this morning Heidi Hammel, vice president of the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy. And, ultimately, that is the key to everything: ambitions are so big that at some point he had to start accounting for his progress.

This is the time: today is the real starting gun. Since its launch, the telescope has been preparing to become fully operational. From now on, the James Webb leaves the calibrations, tests and preparation processes and faces its destiny: change our way of seeing the Universe.

What is left for us to see?

NASA’s original listing advertised images of two nebulae, two planets, and a set of five galaxies. Tomorrow we can enjoy the rest:

The Keel Nebula. One of the brightest nebulae in the sky, the Carina Nebula (or Keel Nebula) is also one of the largest. Located about 7,600 light-years from us, it spans between 50 and 260 light-years. If nebulae are, roughly speaking, clouds of gas from which stars arise, this one has at least twelve stars inside with the mass of between 50 and 100 suns.

WASP-96b (spectrum). The giant planet WASP-96b is a very interesting object: it is the first known planet with an atmosphere that is cloudless (despite being mostly gas). It has about half the mass of Jupiter and is about 1,150 light-years from us where it orbits its star every 3.4 days.

The Eight Bursts Nebula. It is also called the South Ring Nebula or the Eight Explosions Nebula. In this case it is a planetary nebula, a cloud of gas that surrounds a star in its final stages of life and expands away from it at about 15 kilometers per second. It is located about 2,000 light years away and its approximate diameter is half a light year.

Stephan’s quintet. Also known as the Hickson Compact Group 92, it is a group of five galaxies located in a relatively close area. It is also the first cluster of galaxies with its characteristics ever discovered. The farthest galaxies in this cluster are 290 million light-years from us.

Four of these galaxies are close enough that gravitational interactions between them have caused a “dance” of stars that has in turn caused the appearance of the galaxies. A large number of stars of different ages live in them, as shown by the variety of their colors.