The latest made-ya-look image from the James Webb Space Telescope is in, and it looks like… a penguin. A giant penguin in space.
NASA officials on Friday marked two full years of science results from the telescope with the release of the image, which actually shows a pair of entangled galaxies known as Arp 142, and nicknamed the Penguin and the Egg. The first is a spiral galaxy; the second is an elliptical galaxy.
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“The galaxies’ ‘dance’ tugged on Penguin’s thinner gas and dust regions, causing them to collide in waves and form stars,” NASA said in a press release. “Look for those regions in two places: what looks like a fish in its ‘beak’ and the ‘feathers’ in its ‘tail.'”
The Webb telescope has done everything astronomers hoped it could, namely peer deeper into space and farther back in time than any telescope before it. And it has produced beautiful pictures. The universe captured by the Webb’s mirror and instruments is beautiful, dazzling, flamboyant. These arresting images show the remarkable resolution of the Webb telescope, NASA’s successor to the still-operating $10 billion Hubble Space Telescope.
The main reason Webb exists is to do something Hubble can’t: see far into the infrared part of the spectrum, allowing scientists to analyze the highly red-shifted light emitted by galaxies when the universe was very young.
That has come as a big surprise. Astronomers had assumed that the early galaxies would be small and faint. That is not what the Webb saw.
Instead, there is a remarkable collection of large, bright galaxies, many of which contain supermassive black holes, that emitted their light only 300 million years or so after the Big Bang. (The best estimate for the age of the universe is 13.8 billion years.) The processes of star formation and galaxy composition were faster, more efficient, or simply different than what theorists had assumed.
This is how science should work: a new instrument with a new view of nature turns hard data into something where previously only theories, computer models and ideas were available.
“The biggest impact we’ve had so far is understanding the first billion years. That was the elevator pitch to sell the telescope, and it’s gratifying to me how well we’ve done that,” said Jane Rigby, the Webb’s senior scientist. “The universe cooperated.”
Webb scientists stress that the unexpected number of large, bright galaxies early in the universe does not mean the Big Bang theory is wrong.
“We have this flood of data, we have all these interesting things that we’re discovering, and we don’t quite understand why,” said NASA astrophysicist Amber Straughn. But this doesn’t represent the discovery of “new physics” or anything all that revolutionary, she said.
“The Big Bang is still the best theory of the universe we have,” Straughn said.
The Webb has also looked to the nearby universe, including observations of the intriguing Trappist-1 planetary system, where a swarm of rocky planets orbit a red dwarf star. This planetary system is about 41 light-years away, within our own galaxy and virtually next door in the cosmic scheme of things.
One astrobiological question that Webb may still be able to answer is whether red dwarf stars are too stormy for nearby planets to retain an atmosphere and whether it seems likely that life could arise there.
“So far, we have not found a rocky planet like ours with an atmosphere that supports life,” planetary astronomer Heidi Hammel said in an email. “That might require an even bigger telescope.”
Could this telescope find the first irrefutable evidence of alien life? That seems unlikely, Rigby said.
“I personally don’t think Webb is going to find life. It’s not built for it,” Rigby said. “I think we can find potentially habitable planets.”
Garth Illingworth, an astronomer at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who was among those who conceived of the Webb in the late 1980s, said the telescope has collected a huge amount of data on exoplanets — the worlds that orbit distant stars. That data has yet to be pieced together into a coherent picture, he added.
“It’s a bit like an alien walking through an Earth zoo, looking at the enormous variety of animals and then trying to piece together the relationships and commonalities,” he said.
The Webb blasted off into space on Christmas morning 2021 and spent six months getting ready as it orbited the sun, about a million miles from Earth. The big headline from that period was that the telescope overcame 344 potential single-point failures, including the deployment of a tennis-court-sized sunshield that was needed for its cold-temperature observations in the infrared part of the spectrum.
One of the telescope’s 18 hexagonal mirrors took a nasty hit from a micrometeorite, but the impact was limited. NASA has since tried to reduce the risk of such impacts by flying the telescope with the mirrors facing away from the direction of travel.
“We fly it in such a way that it doesn’t, so to speak, fly into the rain,” Straughn said.
The telescope also turned its attention to the worlds we know best, in our own solar system. Jupiter’s icy moon Europa, long known to have a deep subsurface ocean, occasionally leaks carbon dioxide, the Webb found. And the telescope spotted a 6,000-mile-long plume of water erupting from Saturn’s moon Enceladus, which, like Europa, has a hidden ocean beneath its icy crust, Hammel said.
“The next 20 years are only going to be more exciting as we really push the capabilities of this fantastic tool into the unknown and unexpected,” Hammel said.
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