James Webb’s amazing performance, scientists match in seconds (video)

[이데일리 김혜선 기자] The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), located in space 1.5 million kilometers from Earth, is the pinnacle of human space science and technology. While the Hubble Space Telescope observed the visible light region visible to the human eye, James Webb expanded the field of human vision by observing the near-infrared (0.6-5㎛) and mid-infrared (5.5-25.5 ㎛).

James Webb can only perform observational tasks for 6,000 hours in one cycle (Cycle 1). It was like the ‘dream’ of astronomers all over the world to carry out research with James Webb. The Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) selected a total of 286 research proposals by thoroughly examining the scientific value through a blind evaluation. And since James Webb sent the first picture in July, he has continued his observing schedule without a break.

NASA releases images of James Webb that have been thoroughly peer-reviewed. Since September 19, we’ve been publishing ‘pre-release’ images every other week via the official blog. Although scientific papers must be peer reviewed in order to be recognized, they are sometimes ‘pre-published’ without peer review to facilitate information sharing.

The method of publishing these papers has exploded during the outbreak of COVID-19. It has been used as ‘collective intelligence’ around the world, such as the rapid sharing of the genome sequence of the coronavirus. NASA also accepted this academic climate, and decided to share the results of the research through James Webb sooner.

Edaily Snaptime presents some interesting pre-published images by James Webb.

◆ Wolf-Rayet 140 cosmic circle

Dr Ryan Lau from the National Science Foundation of the United States observed the strange wavelength of the Wolf-Rayet 140 in the Cygnus constellation through James Webb and published the results on the 12th of last month. Patterns that look like tree rings radiate from this binary star. Telescopes on Earth could only see two patterns, but James Webb could see as many as 17. When Dr Ryan first saw this picture, he said he suspected that the light was too strong to create an optical illusion .

Dr Ryan called this pattern a ‘dust shell’. Wolf-Rayet stars are very massive stars that are likely to turn into black holes, and have the property of scattering huge amounts of gas around them. In WR140, however, the two stars interacted and formed an unusual tree ring pattern. In an eight-year cycle, when stars come closer together, a lot of gas and dust is produced, and when they move away from each other, the gas diminishes, resulting in ‘rings’.

◆ The primordial universe seen through the lens of gravity, it turns out there were two dots

On the 26th of last month, a team led by Dr. Dan Coe of the European Space Agency into the galaxy cluster MACS0647, which is famous for its gravitational lensing. The cluster is so heavy that it bends light, hidden behind it, the ‘farthest galaxy in the universe’ MACS0647-JD can be seen. It uses the cluster itself as a ‘telescope’ to see distant galaxies.

The part with the gravitational lens does not look like the original celestial body, but it expands and deforms, or in some cases, it appears multiple. MACS0647-JD is also a galaxy visible in three images due to gravitational lensing. Dr. discovered Dan Coe MACS0647-JD for the first time through the Hubble Telescope in 2012. On Hubble, MACS0647-JD looked like a ‘red dot’, but when I looked again with James Webb, I found that there were two lumps.

Dr said. Dan Coe who has not yet been able to decide whether these two fields are ‘stars’ or ‘galaxies’. However, the researchers are very excited, saying, “Maybe it’s a galactic merger in the early universe.” “Studying them could help us understand how they developed into galaxies like the one we live in today,” the researchers hope. “It could also tell us how the universe evolved over time.”

More specifically, the MACS0647-JD light we see is a staggering 13.3 billion years ago. Since the universe is about 13.7 billion years old, MACS0647-JD will provide valuable clues to the study of primordial galaxies.

◆ James Webb’s incredible zoom capabilityWLM

On the 9th, Professor Kristen McQuinn from Rutgers University observed the small galaxy WLM and experienced the remarkable ‘magnification’ of James Webb. WLM, a nearby galaxy 3 million light years from Earth, has attracted the attention of astronomers because it is full of stars, despite the lack of dust and gas compared to other larger galaxies.

The team noted that WLM is an ‘anti-social’ galaxy that is not affected by many other galaxies. In addition, as it has a similar chemical composition to galaxies in the primordial universe, there is hope to gain insight into how stars were formed in the primordial universe.

What surprised the research team more than anything else was the discovery of ‘more stars’ that had not been seen with conventional telescopes. James Webb identified myriads of stars in WLM that varied in color, size, temperature, age, and evolutionary stage.

In the meantime, we have prepared another video that shows James Webb’s amazing ‘zooming ability’. The Canadian Space Agency (CSA) shared a video on its official Twitter on the 7th of last month, starting with a video taken by the Very Large Telescope (VLT) located in the highlands of Chile and ending with a photo of James Webb. The video starts with the Milky Way, which stretches out beautifully in the night sky, and goes all the way to the nearby Large Magellanic Cloud and the Tarantula Nebula (tarantula) within it. The final image in the video is James Webb’s capture of numerous stars in the Tarantula Nebula that are obscured from view by dense gas. Feel the vastness of the universe.