Bday bash (7/13/23)

Good afternoon, and happy Thursday. Let’s get right into it.

Did someone forward you this email? Subscribe to Parallax here.

Happy Birthday, JWST

It’s been a year now since NASA and its partners released the first images from the most powerful space telescope ever built and declared the beginning of a new era of astronomy.

Since then, JWST has been using its four instruments nonstop to expand our awe and understanding of the universe we live in. Astronomers have looked deeper into the void and further back into cosmic history than has ever been possible, uncovering previously shrouded details of the events at the Epoch of Reionization, when the first stars and galaxies were still forming.

Here’s a roundup of some of the greatest images and discoveries notched by JWST over the last year.

A Star is Born

We’ll start off with the newest. An instant classic, this infrared image depicts Rho Ophiuchi, the nearest known star-forming region to us at 390 light-years away. In the image, more than 50 Sun-like stars can be seen forming amid billowing clouds of gas and dust that form a stellar nursery. Some of those stars are hidden partially in shadows that hint at protoplanetary discs, where planets could someday form.

“Webb’s image of Rho Ophiuchi allows us to witness a very brief period in the stellar lifecycle with new clarity,” said Klaus Pontoppidan, a JWST project scientist, in a release. “Our own Sun experienced a phase like this, long ago, and now we have the technology to see the beginning of another’s star’s story.”

Exoplanet Hunting

JWST does much more for science than capture stunning imagery of the cosmos. One of its four science instruments, the Near-Infrared Spectrometer (NIRSpec), is instead intended to break light traveling through space into its component wavelengths in order to suss out details of their origin. Analyzing light from target stars can A) identify the presence of exoplanets in their orbit, and B) reveal details about their composition and potential atmospheres.

In the last year of its operation, JWST has:

• Confirmed its first exoplanet, an Earth-like rocky world called LHS 475 b orbiting a star only 41 light-years away

• Ruled out the presence of an atmosphere on two planets in the TRAPPIST-1 system, a promising target for life-hunting astronomers

• Spotted the signature of water in the atmospheric signature of exoplanet GJ 486 b

The Solar System Survey

We’ve seen the planets of our solar system before, but not like this. Over the last few months of its operation, JWST has turned its focus to four ringed planets at the outer fringe of our own solar system: Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune.

In infrared, different features of these giants stand out than we’re used to. The aurorae that float permanently over Jupiter’s poles stand out in purple. Saturn’s iconic rings take on an eerie glow. 11 of Uranus’ 13 rings shine bright white, and for the first time in the 30+ years since Voyager passed by, we’ve finally got a new view of Neptune’s rings.

The Cosmic Cliffs

Last but certainly not least, happy one-day-belated first birthday to, in my opinion, one of the most awe-inspiring space snapshots of all time (with, fittingly, one of the coolest names). As part of the new space telescope’s first image release, announcing its successful deployment and a new era of space science to the world, NASA put out this image of the Cosmic Cliffs.

The image was taken using the Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam), and shows a small region within the much larger Carina Nebula. It reveals the edge of a cavity in the nebula that’s been eroded away by the intense UV radiation and stellar winds from newly-forming stars, visible across the scene.

+ Want more? It’s been a while, but back when JWST was still in the process of unfolding and deploying all its instruments, I got a chance to talk with Paul Geithner, NASA’s deputy project manager for the technical portion of JWST development, about the 20 years it took to build the space telescope and the details of how each of its four science instruments work. Check out what he had to say here.

Other News from the Cosmos

• ISRO, the Indian space agency, is targeting tomorrow to launch its Chandrayaan-3 uncrewed mission to the Moon.

• Curiosity’s wheels are showing their age after nearly 12 years roving Mars.

• Aligned planetary nebulae near the center of the Milky Way have something in common: closely orbiting stellar companions.

• A new theory of “tired light” proposes that the universe could be nearly twice as old as astronomers currently believe.

• Citizen astronomers set a record for most independent observations of the same astronomical event, supernova (SN) 2023ixf.

The View from Space