First color images of the James Webb Telescope will be presented by NASA

Drawing back the curtain on a photo gallery unlike any other, NASA will soon present the first color images from its James Webb Space Telescope, a revolutionary device designed to peer into the cosmos until the dawn of the universe.

This week’s long-awaited reveal of photos and spectroscopic data from the newly operational observatory follows a six-month process of remotely deploying various components, aligning their mirrors and calibrating instruments.

With Webb now fine-tuned and fully focused, astronomers will embark on a competitively curated list of science projects that explore the evolution of galaxies, the life cycles of stars, the atmospheres of distant exoplanets, and the moons of our outer Solar System.

The first batch of photos, which took weeks to process from raw telescope data, is expected to offer a compelling glimpse of what Webb will capture in science missions to come.

NASA on Friday published a list of five celestial objects chosen for the debut of Webb, built for the US space agency by aerospace giant Northrop Grumman Corp.

Among them are two nebulae — huge clouds of gas and dust thrown into space by stellar explosions that form nurseries for new stars — and two sets of galaxy clusters.

One, according to NASA, features foreground objects so massive that they act as “gravitational lenses,” a visual distortion of space that greatly magnifies the light coming from behind them to expose even fainter objects farther and farther away. back in time. . How far and what appeared on camera remains to be seen.

NASA will also present Webb’s first spectrographic analysis of an exoplanet — roughly half the mass of Jupiter that lies more than 1,100 light-years away — revealing the molecular signatures of filtered light passing through its atmosphere.

‘It moved me as a scientist, as a human being’

All five of Webb’s introductory targets were already known to scientists. One, the group of galaxies 290 million light-years from Earth known as Stephan’s Quintet, was first discovered in 1877.

But NASA officials promise that the Webbs images capture their subjects in an entirely new light, literally.

“What I saw moved me as a scientist, as an engineer and as a human being,” NASA Deputy Administrator Pam Melroy, who reviewed the images, told reporters during a June 29 news conference.

An unspecified image of the collection will be unveiled Monday night by US President Joe Biden at a White House meeting with NASA chief Bill Nelson, the space agency said on Sunday.

The remainder will launch as previously scheduled in a live broadcast and webcast on Tuesday from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, by NASA and its collaborators from the European and Canadian space agencies.

The $9 billion infrared telescope, the largest and most complex astronomical observatory ever sent into space, was launched on Christmas Day from French Guiana, off the northeast coast of South America.

A month later, the 6,350-kilogram instrument reached its gravitational parking spot in solar orbit, circling the sun together with Earth about 1.6 million kilometers from home.

Webb, which sees its objects primarily in the infrared spectrum, is about 100 times more sensitive than its 30-year-old predecessor, the Hubble Space Telescope, which orbits Earth 547 kilometers away and operates primarily in the optical and ultraviolet areas. wavelengths.

The larger light-gathering surface of Webb’s primary mirror—an array of 18 hexagonal segments of gold-coated beryllium metal—allows you to observe objects at greater distances, hence further back in time, than Hubble or any other telescope.

Its infrared sensitivity allows it to detect light sources that would otherwise be hidden in the visible spectrum by dust and gas.

Taken together, these features are expected to transform astronomy, providing the first glimpse of infant galaxies dated to just 100 million years after the Big Bang, the theoretical flash point that set the expansion of the known universe in motion about 13 years ago. .8 billion years.

Webb’s instruments also make it ideal for looking for signs of potentially vital atmospheres around dozens of newly documented planets orbiting distant stars and observing worlds much closer to home, such as Mars and Saturn’s icy moon Titan.

In addition to a number of studies already lined up for Webb, the telescope’s most revolutionary discoveries could turn out to be those that have not yet been anticipated.

Such was the case with Hubble’s surprising discovery, through observations of distant supernovae, that the expansion of the universe is accelerating rather than decelerating, opening up a new field of astrophysics devoted to a mysterious phenomenon that scientists call dark energy. .