James Webb Space Telescope marks 1st year of science with marvelous new image

Julia Musto
Fox News
Fri, 14 Jul 2023 14:55 UTC

© NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Klaus Pontoppidan (STScI)

The Rho Ophiuchi cloud complex: Jets bursting from young stars crisscross the image, impacting the surrounding interstellar gas and lighting up molecular hydrogen, shown in red. Some stars display the telltale shadow of a circumstellar disk, the makings of future planetary systems

NASA is celebrating the first year of the international James Webb Space Telescope's scientific operations with the release of a beautiful new image.

The agency released the $10 billion-dollar observatory's snapshot of a small star-forming region in the Rho Ophiuchi cloud complex. It is the nearest star-forming region to Earth, and its proximity at 390 light-years allows for a detailed shot.

There are no foreground stars in the intervening space. The region contains approximately 50 young stars, all of which are similar in mass to our sun - or smaller.

The darkest areas of the picture show thick dust cocoons still-forming protostars and red bipolar jets of molecular hydrogen appear horizontally across the upper third and vertically on the right. The jets occur when a star first bursts through its natal envelope of cosmic dust, shooting out a pair of opposing jets into space.

In the lower half, the star S1 carved out a glowing cave of dust. It is the only star in the image that is significantly more massive than the sun.

Some stars in the image display shadows that indicate protoplanetary disks, which are potential future planetary systems in the making.

© Alex Wong/Getty Images

Engineers and technicians assemble the James Webb Space Telescope Nov. 2, 2016, at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland

"Webb's image of Rho Ophiuchi allows us to witness a very brief period in the stellar lifecycle with new clarity. 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," Klaus Pontoppidan, who served as Webb project scientist at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, said in a statement.

The telescope's infrared capabilities have captured galaxies and planets in new light and dazzling color.

However, NASA says scientists are the most excited by Webb's information from its spectroscopic instruments. Its observations have already resulted in hundreds of scientific papers answering longstanding questions and raising new ones.

© NASA, ESA, CSA, and STScI

NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has produced the deepest and sharpest infrared image of the distant universe to date. Known as Webb’s First Deep Field, this image of galaxy cluster SMACS 0723 is overflowing with detail. Thousands of galaxies – including the faintest objects ever observed in the infrared – have appeared in Webb’s view for the first time.

"In just one year, the James Webb Space Telescope has transformed humanity's view of the cosmos, peering into dust clouds and seeing light from faraway corners of the universe for the very first time. Every new image is a new discovery, empowering scientists around the globe to ask and answer questions they once could never dream of," NASA Administrator Bill Nelson remarked.

"Thousands of engineers, scientists, and leaders poured their life's passion into this mission, and their efforts will continue to improve our understanding of the origins of the universe - and our place in it," he said.

Julia Musto is a reporter for Fox News and Fox Business Digital.

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All of the young stars appear to be no bigger than our sun. Scientists said the breathtaking shot provides the best clarity yet of this brief phase of a star´s life.

"It´s like a glimpse of what our own system would have looked like billions of years ago when it was forming," NASA program scientist Eric Smith told The Associated Press.

Smith pointed out that the starlight visible in the image actually left there 390 years ago. On Earth in 1633, Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei went on trial in Rome for saying that the Earth revolved around the sun. The Vatican in 1992 acknowledged Galileo was wronged.

This cloud complex, known as Rho Ophiuchi, is the closest star-forming region to Earth and is found in the sky near the border of the constellations Ophiuchus and Scorpius, the serpent-bearer and scorpion. With no stars in the foreground of the photo, NASA noted, the details stand out all the more. Some of the stars display shadows indicating possible planets in the making, according to NASA.

It "presents star birth as an impressionistic masterpiece," NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said in a tweet.

Webb - the largest and most powerful astronomical observatory ever launched into space - has been churning out cosmic beauty shots for the past year. The first pictures from the $10 billion infrared telescope were unveiled last July, six months after its liftoff from French Guiana.

It´s considered the successor to the Hubble Space Telescope, orbiting Earth for 33 years. A joint NASA-European Space Agency effort, Webb scans the universe from a more distant perch, 1 million miles (1.6 million kilometers) away.