The Webb is finally set up and working. What’s next?

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[OscarCP]

The Webb is now officially ready for being used by astronomers.
So what to expect now from it in the months, years and, one hopes, decades ahead?

Brian Green, a physicist and commentator, recapitulates the Webb’s odyssey and presents, for discussion, the most recent pictures in the “World Science Festival.” This is a remarkably Website dedicated to the sciences, with discussions on big topics that are about one hour long each, technically serious as well as often entertaining, with speakers who are scientific authorities on each topic under consideration:

https://cdn.worldsciencefestival.com/

In this case, a panel of several people that have been involved from over a quarter of a century until the present in this very long and costly project to develop, build, deploy and now operate the most powerful space telescope ever made.

Among the participating in the panel of leaders of the project, is Nobel Price John Mather, the Webb’s Senior Leader Scientist and who also, three decades ago, was one of the leaders of COBE, the spacecraft mission that produced the first 360-degree map and image of the now very cold microwave background radiation that pervades the Universe and is what is left of fiery glow of the Cosmos when it first became transparent to light, “just” four hundred million years after the Big Bang:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5sMZw_DM5eA

From the YT Notes:

“Scientists have waited a generation to see the stunning images that the James Webb Telescope is now delivering. In a live online Q+A, Brian Greene will speak with Nobel Prize-winner John Mather and other key project scientists about the telescope’s first full color images, looking back in time farther than ever before and providing unprecedented observations of the birth of stars and the formation of galaxies. Join us to see these captivating first images and learn how our understanding of astronomy could be changed forever.

This program is part of the Big Ideas series, supported by the John Templeton Foundation.

Participants:
John Mather
Marcia Rieke
George Rieke
Rene Doyon
Pierre Ferruit

Moderator:
Brian Greene”

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• This topic was modified 2 years, 10 months ago by OscarCP.
• This topic was modified 2 years, 10 months ago by OscarCP.
• This topic was modified 2 years, 10 months ago by OscarCP.
• This topic was modified 2 years, 10 months ago by OscarCP.

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JohnW, wavy, Sky, AlphaCharlie

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4.7 Micrometeoroids

..Inevitably, any spacecraft will encounter micrometeoroids. During commissioning, wavefront sensing
recorded six localized surface deformations on the primary mirror that are attributed to impact by
micrometeoroids. .. the micrometeoroid which hit segment C3 in the period 22—24 May 2022 UT caused
significant uncorrectable change in the overall figure of that segment. However, the effect was small at the
full telescope level because only a small portion of the telescope area was affected…

https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/2207/2207.05632.pdf

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As it was mentioned after the first impact happened in May by a member of the team responsible for the Webb, something like this was expected to happen maybe every five years, not so soon after deploying the main mirror. And then there were several more impacts … Makes one wonder if the telescope is in as ideal a place as its current one was thought to be when planning the mission.

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Alex5723

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Webb Images of Jupiter and More Now Available In Commissioning Data

On the heels of Tuesday’s release of the first images from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, data from the telescope’s commissioning period is now being released on the Space Telescope Science Institute’s Mikulski Archive for Space Telescopes. The data includes images of Jupiter and images and spectra of several asteroids, captured to test the telescope’s instruments before science operations officially began July 12. The data demonstrates Webb’s ability to track solar system targets and produce images and spectra with unprecedented detail…

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OscarCP, Charlie

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This looks like a picture taken with a space probe passing near or orbiting Jupiter. Probably the most detailed image of Jupiter ever seen with a telescope.

And pleased to learn that the Webb telescope data is being kept for public distribution at a NASA archive here in Maryland, named after the redoubtable Barbara Mikulski, for the longest time an US Senator for Maryland and the at times fiery Goddess Protector of everything worth doing in NASA in general and, most particularly, at Goddard Space Flight Center (and home to the Space Telescope Science Institute, in Greenbelt, Maryland).

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Alex5723

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How is the Webb going to be used?
Several questions and some interesting answers, including the very important one of who gets observing time on the Webb and how:

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/meet-the-woman-who-makes-the-james-webb-space-telescope-work/?utm_source=Nature+Briefing&utm_campaign=04c2303b17-briefing-wk-20220722&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_c9dfd39373-04c2303b17-46599146

Excerpt:

“There’s no “who you know” inside track. Most of Webb’s time is allocated through very competitive peer review. For Cycle 1 General Observer programs, we enlisted a panel of 200 experts—all virtual because of COVID—to review and rank more than a thousand proposals from all over the world. The top quarter of proposals were selected. That’s done dual anonymously: reviewers don’t know who wrote the proposals, and the proposers don’t know who reviews them. We want to judge by the quality of the ideas. That means, for instance, it’s possible for an autodidact from outside academia to get time on Webb. You could live in a country that doesn’t necessarily like our country, or that didn’t do anything to help build the telescope, and in most cases you can still use it, right? It’s an open competition because we want the best ideas.“

Ex-Windows user (Win. 98, XP, 7); since mid-2017 using also macOS. Presently on Monterey 12.15 & sometimes running also Linux (Mint).

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Europe’s GAIA space observatory.

Fly through Gaia probe’s catalog of Milky Way stars

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OscarCP

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Gaia snaps photo of Webb

On 18 February, the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope was photographed by ESA’s Gaia observatory.

Both spacecraft are located in orbits around the Lagrange point 2 (L2), 1.5 million km from Earth in the direction away from the Sun. Gaia arrived there in 2014, and Webb in January 2022.

On 18 February 2022, the two spacecraft were 1 million km apart, with an edge-on view of Gaia towards Webb’s huge sunshield. Very little reflected sunlight came Gaia’s way, and Webb therefore appears as a tiny, faint spec of light in Gaia’s two telescopes without any details visible.

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OscarCP, wavy

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LARGEST-YET IMAGE FROM THE WEBB TELESCOPE REVEALS NEW STUNNING GALAXIES

The first is a beautiful bright blue spiral arm galaxy at a relatively recent redshift of 0.16. You can easily make out bright pockets of star formation within the arms of the galaxy.

The second is an elliptical galaxy at a redshift of 1.05 that team member Rebecca Larson, a University of Texas Austin astronomy doctoral student, dubbed Pac-Man. The much larger elliptical galaxy looms in front of an arc of smaller, evenly sized, evenly spaced galaxies. Of course, it’s nowhere near devouring the dots in front of it.

The third is a set of interacting galaxies from around 9 billion years ago that CEERS primary investigator Steven Finklestein nicknamed the Space Kraken.

The fourth is two spiral galaxies interacting. By comparing it with (less crisp) imagery of the same galaxies taken by the Hubble Space Telescope over the last decade, astronomers have likely found the Webb Space Telescope’s first supernova. This research, published last month in AstroNotes, is one of several investigations that have already begun to spin off from the images gathered by CEERS.

The fifth is an extremely detailed image of a spiral galaxy from 6.4 billion years ago. The sixth is a set of bright red and orange merging galaxies that CEERS used to compare the sharpness of the Webb Space Telescope’s imagery against Hubble during the first releases…

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Fred, Charlie

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The Webb has made its first images showing a planet orbiting another star (i.e. an exoplanet):

https://news.cornell.edu/stories/2022/09/nasa-releases-first-webb-telescope-image-exoplanet#:~:text=For%20the%20first%20time%2C%20astronomers,and%20could%20not%20be%20habitable.

Excerpts:

“For the first time, astronomers have used NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) to take a direct image of a planet outside our solar system. The exoplanet is a gas giant, meaning it has no rocky surface and could not be habitable.”

“The exoplanet in Webb’s image, called HIP 65426 b, is about six to 12 times the mass of Jupiter, and these observations could help narrow that down even further. It is young as planets go – about 15 to 20 million years old, compared with our 4.5-billion-year-old Earth.”

(“HIP 65426” is the name of the star — otherwise not visible to the naked eye and named already, in a large catalogue of stars — while “b” indicates this is the first of its planets to be found.)

Exoplanets have been imaged directly by the Hubble and some of the new large telescopes at observatories on Earth, but not in as fine detail as with the Webb.

This planet is about 100 times farther away from its star as Earth is from the Sun, so it’s twice as far from this star as Pluto is from the Sun.
The black circles in the pictures with the symbol of a white star at the center indicate a shadow made by blocking the star itself, so its stronger light does not swamp the one reflected by the planet. The blocking was made using a small shade placed in front of the star in the small focal plane where the images are detected with a photosensitive chip. The instrument used to project this shadow is known as a chronograph.

This observation proves that the Webb can image exoplanets, as was expected, but now is confirmed in reality. That is, besides being also able to be used to study the composition of their atmospheres by a spectroscopic analysis of the star’s light shining through them, as it has done already, something that can also help figure out whether there might be life there.

The importance of being able to image directly such planets is that this adds a third method for detecting these and finding their orbits, and from that to gain other information, such as the mass and size of each, something that would help determine whether they are gas giants like Jupiter, or rocky planets, like Earth. (The other two methods are: by occultation, when a planet passes in front of its star and dims the light received from it, and Doppler shift, as the star moves around its and the planet’s common center of mass, and so back and forth, its color shifting to the red and to the blue, respectively, as seen from Earth, or from the Webb.)

 

This image shows the exoplanet HIP 65426 b in different bands of infrared light, as observed with two different cameras from the James Webb Space Telescope.

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Fred

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