Nasa reveals new images of distant cosmos

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Nasa has concluded its event in which it revealed more stunning images captured by the $10bn James Webb Space Telescope.

Here are some of the highlights:

• Nasa has been working for more than two decades to present its "scientific marvel" of the first full-colour pictures of the cosmos
• The breathtaking images show the formation of stars and devouring black holes that give humanity "a view of the universe we've never seen before"
• The images of space exceed looking back over 13 billion years marking "a great engineering feat for humanity and planet Earth"
• US President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris "geeked out" after being shown the space images in advance at the White House
• One picture showed a spectrum obtained for the atmosphere of WASP-96b, a giant planet outside our Solar System, about 1,150 light-years from Earth
• We also saw the Southern Ring, a giant expanding sphere of gas and dust that’s been lit up by a dying star in the centre - Stephan’s Quintet located about 290 million light-years away - and the Carina Nebula, one of the largest and brightest nebulae revealing a "cosmic reef"

NASA, ESA, CSA, and STScICopyright: NASA, ESA, CSA, and STScI

Nasa has been revealing breathtaking new images of the early universe, taken by the James Webb Space Telescope.

Four more images have been released today after the first full-colour picture was unveiled yesterday.

NASA, ESA, CSA, and STScICopyright: NASA, ESA, CSA, and STScI

NASA, ESA, CSA, and STScICopyright: NASA, ESA, CSA, and STScI

NASA, ESA, CSA, and STScICopyright: NASA, ESA, CSA, and STScI

NASA, ESA, CSA, and STScICopyright: NASA, ESA, CSA, and STScI

NASA, ESA, CSA, and STScICopyright: NASA, ESA, CSA, and STScI

My favourite part was seeing the spectrum of a galaxy over 13 billion light years away - I’ve been waiting impatiently to find out how the on-board spectrograph capable of taking spectra of hundreds of galaxies at once is performing.

But the final image of the Carina Nebula had the most gasps from the people in the room. Absolutely stunning.

The sharpness and level of detail in all the images has simply blown me away.

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Klaus Pontopiddan, Webb project scientist, describes the moment the team started receiving information from the Webb telescope:

“People were speechless, and there were emotions, because we immediately could see how amazing this observatory would be – the detail, the sharpness, the depth – and when we saw the first colour images we knew we had a winner.”

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The images from the James Webb Space Telescope were created by translating "light that we can't see into light we can see by applying colours like red, green and blue to different filters that we have from Webb", Nasa visual developer, Joe Depasquale, says.

The reason for colouring the images is because "you can get more information from the image if you see it in colour", he explains.

"It's a matter of picking colours and filters to enhance details and structures in the image itself," science visual developer Alyssa Pagan adds.

It involves "painstakingly going through and cleaning them up at pixel level in every image", Depasquale says.

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These first images from the James Webb Space Telescope are jaw-dropping.

Take a moment to gaze at them, and the detail begins to emerge - those tiny bursts of light are galaxies containing trillions of stars.

The sheer amount of information each image contains is dizzying. But this treasure trove comes from only a few days of observations - and so far the telescope’s only looked at a minute fraction of the sky - Webb will be capturing the cosmos for the next 20 years.

There’s a check list of discoveries that astronomers are hoping to tick off - from seeing the first stars to shine to finding habitable planets beyond our solar system.

But the thing that’s most exciting scientists is the discoveries they haven’t even dreamt of.

Amber Straughn, Webb deputy project scientist, describes the last image to be revealed, saying it's a "stunning vista of the cosmic cliffs of the Carina Nebula" that "reveals new details about this vast stellar nursery".

Straughn adds: "Today for the first time we’re seeing brand new stars that were previously completely hidden from our view.

"We see examples of bubbles and cavities and jets that are being blown out by these newborn stars, and even some galaxies lurking... We see some examples of structures that we don't even know what they are. The data is so rich."

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The Carina Nebula was a classic target of the Hubble telescope – Webb’s predecessor - although in this Webb version we get a very different rendering.

Carina is one of the largest and brightest nebulae in the sky, located roughly 7,600 light-years from Earth. Nebulae are stellar nurseries.

They are massive clouds of gas and dust in which new stars are forming.

Except in this Webb image, we don't only see the stars – our eyes are drawn to all that gas and the dust.

Astronomers refer here to a “cosmic cliff” - a kind of broad demarcation between dust in the bottom half and gas streamers in the top half.

One of Webb’s key scientific goals is to study how stars form and Carina is an excellent place to do that.

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About 290 million light-years away, Stephan’s Quintet is located in the constellation Pegasus.

It’s notable for being the first compact galaxy group ever discovered.

Four of the five galaxies within the quintet are locked in a cosmic dance of repeated close encounters.

This Webb telescope image doesn’t look that different from the Hubble telescope version at first glance, but the new telescope’s infrared sensitivity will pull out different features for astronomers to study.

And this was the great hope – that we would have Webb working alongside Hubble.

They have different strengths and being able to compare and contrast will give scientists a new dimension to their studies.

We don’t know for how much longer Hubble will operate.

It’s 32 years old and prone to technical glitches. But the officials at Nasa who’re in charge of the old warhorse have just submitted a five-year budget plan.

Keep your fingers crossed.

The image of the Southern Ring shows a planetary nebula "caused by a dying star that dispelled a large fraction of its mass in excessive waves", which Nasa says can be seen in the images.

The image shows a bubbly, foamy appearance with some very structured shells, and the orange foam is due to the molecular hydrogen which formed in the expansion, lighting up the gas and dust of the nebula (a body of interstellar clouds).

The blue haze closer to the centre of the image is due to hot ionized gas that is heated by the very hot leftover core of the star.

The rays in the outer regions are holes in the inner nebula which are letting the central star's light come out, giving the appearance of patchy clouds with the sun shining through.

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NASA, ESA, CSA, and STScICopyright: NASA, ESA, CSA, and STScI

You’ll have seen versions of this in those coffee table books of stunning Hubble images.

The Southern Ring, or “Eight-Burst” nebula, is a giant expanding sphere of gas and dust that’s been lit up by a dying star in the centre.

As stars age, they change the way they make energy and eject their outer layers.

And then, when the star gets very hot again, it energises all that material it had previously spurned.

The Southern Ring is nearly half a light-year in diameter and is located about 2,000 light-years from Earth.

This type of structure is called a “planetary nebula”, but it actually has nothing to do with planets.

It’s a misnomer from the early days of telescopes when they didn’t have anything like the resolution they have today.

Just as Webb wants to see how stars are born, it wants to see how they die, also.

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This is not a pretty picture. This is a spectrum. About a half of what Webb will do is spectroscopy.

This involves splitting light into its component “colours” to reveal something about a target’s properties – what it’s made of, how fast it’s moving, how hot it is, etc.

This is a spectrum obtained for the atmosphere of WASP-96b, a giant planet outside our Solar System, about 1,150 light-years from Earth.

WASP-96b is a bit like Jupiter; it has a big gaseous shroud.

And Webb is able to identify with stunning precision molecules in the atmosphere.

You see a clear marker for water vapour. WASP-96b is not the right kind of planet to host life; it’s too close and too hot to its parent star for that.

But Webb will be looking for planets that have atmospheres similar to Earth.

When that happens, we will be asking: could those planets be habitable?

Dr Jane Rigby has been talking us through that first image:

"We are seeing how those cluster galaxies looked about the time the Sun and the Earth formed.

"The gravity of the clusters is distorting and warping our view of what’s behind – and so the galaxies look stretched and pulled, like they’ve been magnified by the gravity of the cluster – just like Einstein said they would.

"There is so much detail here - we’re seeing these galaxies like we’ve never been able to see them before. There’s a sharpness and a clarity we’ve never had.

"I encourage you to zoom in – we can see individual clusters of stars forming, just popping up like popcorn."

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US President Joe Biden was shown the full-colour image of the early cosmos yesterday during a White House briefing.

Dr Jane Rigby, Nasa operations project scientist for the Webb mission, was there to show it to him and Vice President Harris.

"We really geeked out!" she said. "We had a closed door session where we walked through all the images and they were so thrilled," she said.

Biden said pictures from the James Webb Space Telescope would “remind the world that America can do big things” and show the American people, especially children, “there’s nothing beyond our capacity”.

Biden also said the image allows us to “go places no-one has ever gone before”.

Nasa begins by discussing the image it released yesterday.

It is said to be the deepest, most detailed infrared view of the Universe to date, containing the light from galaxies that has taken many billions of years to reach us.

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We're still waiting on Nasa to release the first full-colour images from the James Webb Space Telescope, showing the Universe in detail like never before. They are really building up the anticipation.

"It's a completely new way to explore the Universe, marking the dawn of a new era," astronomer Michelle Thaller says.

The images, taken by the world’s largest and most powerful space telescope, will be released one by one.

That’s the much publicised ticket price for James Webb. Of course, you have to remember that most of that money was spent over the two decades of Webb’s construction.

But I’ll venture it’s been good value from money.

Why? Because Webb will get us nearer to answering some of the most fundamental questions about our existence.

Consider this: One of Webb’s overarching goals is to image the light coming from the very first stars to light up the Universe more than 13.5 billion years ago.

Back then, these stars contained only the hydrogen, helium and lithium created in the Big Bang. All the elements heavier in the periodic table had to be forged in those first stars and their successors. Think about that.

Webb could show us a time when there was no carbon – the foundation on which all life as we know it is built.

In the image revealed yesterday from the James Webb Space Telescope, we can see a cluster of galaxies in the Southern Hemisphere constellation of Volans known by the ungainly name of SMACS 0723.

The cluster itself isn't actually that far away - "only" about 4.6 billion light-years in the distance. But the great mass of this cluster has bent and magnified the light of objects that are much, much further away.

It's a gravitational effect; the astronomical equivalent of a zoom lens for a telescope.

Webb, with its 6.5m-wide golden mirror and super-sensitive infrared instruments, has managed to detect in the picture the distorted shape (the red arcs) of galaxies that existed a mere 600 million years after the Big Bang (the Universe is 13.8 billion years old).

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The images you're going to see in a matter of minutes exceed looking back 13 billion years, Nasa Administrator Bill Nelson says.

"The speed of light is 186,000 miles per second and that light has been travelling for 13.5 billion years - only about a few hundred million years after the beginning, that's the threshold we are crossing," he says.

He says it is the largest international space science programme to date, and a great engineering feat "for humanity and planet Earth".