NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope reveals four new images

[Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] do [Music] do [Music] so [Music] do [Music] do [Music] so [Music] do [Music] sky watchers this is it this is the day we get the first science images back from the james webb space telescope and you've got a front row seat to the cosmos i'm michelle thaller your host what can only be described as a celebration for everyone on earth so think about this light from the earliest days of the universe has been traveling to us for billions of years just over the last few weeks we've captured some of that light with the telescope that sees the universe in an entirely new way and today we share the very first results so long time space fans are going to know who this is this is dr john mather he's the senior project scientist for the webb telescope and a nobel prize winner and john i couldn't be happier to be here with you today thank you it's a thrill to be here for this very special day how are you feeling i am thrilled and i'm relieved because you know when you start something this big you know there's always a possibility it might not work it did work we are so proud you've been on this project for a very long time right yeah started in 1995 we had just finished measuring the big bang we measured it with a cosmic background explorer satellite that we built right here at goddard and we measured the spectrum we measured there are hot and cold spots in the big bang so we said now we know it all how it all got started but then what happened after that so then i got a call from nasa headquarters would i like to work on this new telescope that's going to help answer those questions what happened after the big bang how did the galaxies grow how did the first black holes grow what happened all the way from there to here so this is our time machine and i just wanted to be part of it i am so thrilled that we got a chance to do it one of the things that i remember you saying this is kind of amazing that you after you win the nobel prize you thought that this mission was the most important thing to work on absolutely it's the next question after you know how it started what happened then and you know when suddenly we now have the technology to do it we didn't have 50 years ago didn't have the technology 25 years ago even when they started this we had to invent things along the way so we did that and here it is well thank you we'll be back to you in just a moment so at the moment we're going to talk about the way that web is a completely new way to explore the universe so today the mission releases its first science images and gives wings to the dreams of so many people who worked so hard for so long to make this possible for everyone on earth this is your telescope this is the largest most powerful observatory ever put into space it's the product of thousands of people working for more than two decades this is a mission that's singularly focused on the biggest questions in science so the following phrase is often used too easily but today actually does mark the dawn of a new era today the web mission is open for scientific business and this is just the beginning the best is yet to come so john one of the things you told me about is that you really want to make sure there are some people that get thanked people that put a huge amount of effort into this absolutely our current project manager bill oaks uh took the project from a time of trouble when we didn't exactly know how we were going to get this to work and got it all the way to the end here it is it is working and it's because of bill made this worldwide team 20 000 people around the world were involved in making this thing all work and bill has been there every day making sure that it would happen so another special person is senator barbara mikulski she saved our telescope and she saved the telescope before us she made sure after the hubble telescope was launched and it was not in focus that we would go up and fix it she made sure that happened when the web telescope needed more resources she made sure we could get that so barbara we thank you well it's such an honor to be with you jay i mean it's been a pleasure to be working with you through this whole thing thank you so much congratulations and goweb thank you so this broadcast much like every part of this mission is a partnership on our journey to explore distant places in space we've been joined by intrepid travelers from around the globe we have so many extraordinary collaborators so let's check in with our partners who will be sharing the stage with us today as we reveal webb's five first science images from the european space agency i'm joined by katie haswell in darmstadt germany katie i see katie in the background there also joining us from the canadian space agency in montreal we have natalie willette and sarah gallagher bonjour i see katie in the background there and so naturally we're also going to be visiting the nerve center of this mission the space telescope science institute on the campus of johns hopkins university in baltimore maryland and there we have alex lockwood and carl gordon and they're going to give us updates and more good morning great so we'll be back with our international partners shortly where they'll each reveal one of the new images but today we're also going to be joined by millions of science fans from around the world many are gathered at watch parties just for this event so here we are really going international so i'm beginning with bhopal india do we have a signal from bhopal yes excellent welcome to nasa hello everybody there wonderful to be talking to you today all the way in india we'll be back to them later yes great to wave to you hi wonderful and we're also we also have a warm welcome now in portland oregon so we have the feed from portland a bit dark but i see anybody there hello portland they're an auditorium i see okay okay next we're gonna go off to milan italy so afternoon in italy do we have the feed from italy i guess we have a screen from italy and next we're going to go to rutland vermont so is this vermont hello vermont hi everybody nice to see you thank you for being part of this today okay going even a little bit further afield we have natanya israel hello hello israel yay really nice to see you guys okay just one more for now uh i see people like giving me hugs okay we also have vancouver canada hey vancouver hi all right wonderful wonderful to have all these people with you so right across from the campus for me there's also a huge watch party taking place with members of the web team so the wonderful thing is that they actually are people that have worked on the mission and they are part of our nasa funny stay up the family so hello hello web team there they are yes a lot of people i recognize there so it's incredibly important to me personally and also to all of us at nasa that the universe belongs to everyone and we are thrilled to share this day with fans everywhere around the world we'll say hello to some more later in our broadcast so now it's time to start the main event what you'll see over the next hour will be a collection of images newly processed by the web science team only a tiny handful of experts have seen the images so far and i can tell you that we have been so excited to unwrap them for everyone we will be releasing each image in turn in real time as soon as you see it on this broadcast it will be available for download on the internet on the screen below you can see a timeline showing where we are in the show and what's coming up next and by the end of the show all five images will be available to everyone so hopefully you can tell i'm excited okay so let's do this [Music] so okay we're going to release the first image right here at nasa goddard space flight center maryland and we're just outside of washington dc nasa goddard is home to the project office of the webb telescope and the observatory portion of the telescope the mirrors and the science instruments were integrated and tested here before launch so for many of us including myself seeing web come together bit by bit right in front of our eyes was an emotional and very inspiring experience so it's kind of like a part of us was out there with webb right now a million miles away part of our hopes and dreams are out there so i'm joined now by jane rigby the operations project scientist for the web mission and she's a familiar face for people who've been following this before so welcome jane hi michelle okay so jane you not only get the honor of revealing the first image but this actually got a little bit of a sneak preview i understand there was a very select audience who's already seen the image yes so last night uh on behalf of the project i had the privilege of traveling to the white house uh with the nelson with the nasa administrator nelson and other senior staff to share our first image with president biden and vice president harris and it it was really fun oh my gosh um where uh they really geeked out we had a closed door session where we got to walk through all the images and just share the excitement and they were so thrilled and they got the profundity of what we're seeing and so now we're gonna we're gonna let's do it okay we've got the whole world watching are you ready to put the first image up oh let's do it let's do it absolutely all right here we go okay so the first image is a deep field and it's also a deep field with a cluster so why don't we walk through this just a little bit so if we come up and look at this image first of all it's really gorgeous and it's teeming with galaxies and that's something that has been true for every image we've gotten with web we can't take blank sky everywhere we look there's galaxies everywhere and so you know this gal this this image as we're looking at it what we're seeing is not just all the galaxies but there's a cluster here and so the cluster all these white kind of ethereal galaxies we're seeing them as they looked back in time right the speed of light is only so fast and so as we're seeing distant galaxies out in space we're seeing them as they looked billions of years ago so these cluster galaxies the white ones were seeing as they looked about the time the sun and the earth formed and then behind the cluster we have the cluster the the gravity of the cluster is distorting and warping our view of what's behind and so there are these galaxies that look stretched and pulled kind of like like they've been magnified because they've been magnified by the gravity of the cluster just like einstein said they would and you know it's really there's so much detail here we're seeing these galaxies in a way that we've never been able to see before there's just a sharpness and a clarity we've never had and so we can look at if we zoom in on this image and i encourage you as you grab this image at home like zoom in it you can you know really zoom in and play around there are galaxies here in which you're seeing individual clusters of stars forming popping up just like popcorn and then we also see in the background of the scallop of this image kind of littered like jewels all over the back of the image are these faint red galaxies now that was what we built the telescope to do the most distant of those are billions of years we're seeing as they looked more than 13 billion years ago and so galaxies like that one right there this little red guy you're like okay yep what is that well webb got spectra to figure out what those galaxies are made of and this is that one we're seeing as it looked 13.1 billion years in the past less than a billion years after the big bang and we're seeing the elements of oxygen and hydrogen as well as neon you know this is the kind this is how the oxygen in our bodies was made in stars in galaxies and we're seeing that process get started yeah i just i want to give this a little bit of context so this is now the farthest away galaxy that we have this sort of detailed information about that we know what it's made we know what it's made of and this was not a long exposure for web no the the the private the previous record holder right the hubble of extreme deep field was two weeks of continuous work with hubble and it was just imaging with web we took that image before breakfast the amazing thing about web is the speed at which we can churn out discoveries so everything that you're going to see here in this broadcast is a week and we're going to be doing discoveries like this every week that is absolutely incredible jane so thank you so much for joining us i it's been an honor to be working with you congratulations on all your hard work thank you it's so wonderful to see it pay off so thank you and i'll see you later on today i hope so enjoy the day thank you right so from distant galaxies we now turn our eye to something a bit closer it's a planet but not one in our solar system remember that earth and its sibling planets aren't the only show in the universe when scientists and engineers started developing jwst the search for exoplanets wasn't even part of the plan that's changed exploring exoplanets is now a major component of the mission and the subject of our second big reveal of the day i'm going to send it down to our friends natalie willette and sarah gallagher at the canadian space agency in montreal so again bonjour i guess we're having a little and i'm here to tell you sorry for the brief pause there we're now going over to canada okay yep we're all ready yeah sorry okay i apologize we're having some trouble with the signal from canada but luckily for us we have an exoplanet expert right here just in case that happened so this is nicole colon and she's an exoplanet scientist at nasa and we're going to talk about this amazing new result from a very hot planet i understand about a thousand light years away that's right the exoplanet is named wasp 96b and it is this hot gaseous giant puffy planet that it is about a thousand light years away so that's why today's release is so exciting absolutely so talk us through what this discovery is and why this is so significant well this reveal that you're going to see is going to show the first spectrum of an exoplanet as taken from the webb telescope and this is exciting because it covers infrared wavelengths of light that we have not had access to before so we've been able to use other telescopes to explore exoplanet atmospheres in the infrared but not to this level of detail and this is just one sliver of data that web is providing us using the nearest instrument specifically and there's something about um infrared that is actually particularly good for the spectrum so in this in this case what we're doing is we're actually going to take the light and break it up into a rainbow and look very very carefully at how much color is coming in each cut in each part of the spectrum so i believe we have that image if we can put that up okay yes i i believe we're revealing the spectrum right here so we now have our spectrum and this is exactly what you're seeing as you just described with spectroscopy what we did was we observed a transit of an exoplanet we observed the planet as it passed in front of the star now mind you this is not a direct image this is an indirect image so we've seen the effect of what happens on the planet and its atmosphere passes in front of the star the starlight filters through the atmosphere and then you can break that down into wavelengths of light and you get a bunch of what looks like bumps and wiggles to some people but it's actually full of information content so you're actually seeing bumps and wiggles that indicate the presence of water vapor in the atmosphere of this exoplanet so we have the spectrum up here is there anything you'd like to highlight particularly yeah absolutely so we have um several features marked here so i call them features they are these what i just referred to as bumps and wiggles but what you're seeing here is the telltale signature the chemical fingerprint of water vapor in these atmospheres in the in the atmosphere of this specific exoplanet and the other thing we can tell actually is that there's evidence of clouds and hazes because the water features are not quite as large as we predicted so we can take that and infer that there are presence of clouds and hazes right now one thing that we really want to make sure people understand is with this particular planet this is a hot world it's actually closer to its star than mercury is to our sun and so we're not looking at liquid water here but we're looking instead of that sort of steam water vapor yes this is a an exoplanet it's about the size of jupiter about half the mass of jupiter it orbits around a sun-like star but it does it every about three and a half days so it's extremely hot extremely close in nothing like our solar system planets but that's okay because what we're seeing is again the first exoplanet data from web and this is just the beginning we're going to start pushing down to further smaller planets and being able to take measurements just like this with the nearest instrument that was built by the canadian space agency but also there's other three three other science instruments that will add to our knowledge in the infrared as well as direct imaging modes along with the transit method so there's a lot more to come i guess one thing we should mention is not only are we going to be looking at planets that are more like the earth in the future but we'll also be looking at planets in our own solar system absolutely yes we're going to have exciting data from planets in our solar system from mars uh outward as well as asteroids and comets so stay tuned for a lot more to come thank you so much nicole thank you so much for telling us about the spectrum and i'll be seeing you later on today so we have three more big image reveals and with that new and more exciting science but first let's take a look back at the journey that brought us to this moment celebrations on this one are only possible with years of hard work from a cast of thousands when a new mission is being built even the most enthusiastic space fans only get to see dramatic moments in this life cycle the news and images that come out of updates and press releases but that doesn't really give you the sense of the huge effort that goes on behind the scenes every day the plan schedules an organization to keep everything moving forward really happens for the most part out of people's gaze web started as an idea that took root at nasa goddard a group first into planning teams research projects schematics requirements then it began the long journey to become real with the development of new technologies cutting edge engineering and finally fabrication putting it all together let's take a brief look back at the visionary journey to how we all got here today so today was the final close-out of the purge okay guys i can hear rupa but pretty emotional moment to be in there actually you know closing it up for the very last time right you know you're the last one to touch this so that was the final operation and once that fitting is closed out there's no more fetching of the vehicle we're ready for launch [Music] the james webb space telescope born from the desires of astronomers achieved with newly invented technology is the culmination of 20 years of work humanity has unlimited questions about our universe engineering a way to investigate them requires enormous creativity web has been a trade-off between engineering performance what the astronomers want risk in fact when we started 20 years ago we were actually looking at an 8 meter telescope developing the most sensitive instruments and testing and more [Music] testing and so you don't want to build one that's just incrementally better than what you've got because if that's the case you would just observe longer on the telescope that you already got and so every time nasa builds a new astrophysics mission a new telescope it needs to be way more sensitive you know way more capable than anything we've ever built before we all got together in that conference room and we played real time as the images came down from the spacecraft the very first diffraction limited images ever obtained with web and what we collectively saw as a group was the highest resolution infrared image taken from space ever if you're just joining us i'm michelle thaller at nasa's goddard space flight center and you are watching live coverage of the release of the first science images from the james webb space telescope so it's appropriate now that i send the broadcast to our colleagues and friends at the space telescope science institute in baltimore that's the scientific nerd center of the entire web mission so hello good morning alex the show is yours hey michelle welcome to the space telescope science institute i'm alex lockwood and i'm here with carl gordon who is an astronomer and one of the key people in delivering the images that you're going to see here today but actually before we get into the amazing images we're going to talk a little bit about where we are we're standing here outside of the mission operations center which is the key central hub for web for the past six months scientists and engineers have been working 24 7 since they took control of the telescope 30 minutes after launch to prepare for today and for the amazing science to come through all of the major deployments focusing aligning the telescope and calibrating those four amazing science instruments it was all done in this building and from here on out we'll have daily communications with the telescope including sending commands and downloading data with the help of the deep space network in addition to mission operations we are also the home of science operations well what does that mean every year we solicit proposals from astronomers across the country for and the world for what they would like to look at with web then we hold a rigorous selection process to select the ideas that will best utilize web to study and understand our universe when the data come down and astronomers analyze their results we are the lucky ones who get to share that data and those amazing science results with you and we knew that today was going to be so exciting with the first images so we've actually been preparing for years here is klaus pentapidin project scientist for web and the technical lead for the first image that's been a year to tell you about the process of the past my first email related to the uh the first images was back from 2016. [Music] so back then a committee was created and this committee was charged with coming up with a long list of targets for the first images and the reason for that is that the observatory can't see the entire sky at any given time and this is because you want to avoid the mirror seeing direct sunlight to keep it cold it actually had to be quite a long list we ended up with about 70 targets from which we had to select only a handful you know what would create the most beautiful images what would highlight the instruments the four different four science instruments for web and what would highlight the four major science themes for web and it's a celebration as well of the beginning of science observations and we knew that selecting the images was just the beginning that we would need a trained eye to take these exquisite data and pull out the beauty and the science potential so here's jodi pasquale and elisa pagan to tell you about how they processed these beautiful images [Music] we're basically translating light that we can't see into light that we can see by applying uh color like red green and blue to the different filters that we have from web and the reason we want to color the images is because there's actually more that you can get more information that you can get from the image if you see it in color so it's a matter of picking and choosing filters and colors that enhance the details and the structure in the image itself the shortest wavelengths of infrared light and assign those blue colors and then move our way down to green and red as we go to longer and longer wavelengths and then we additively combine those together to get our full color image but there is a lot of aesthetics that are involved in this painstakingly going through and cleaning these images up with an attention to detail level of detail like at the pixel level in every image so when i'm working on the astronomical data it is this sort of marriage between art and science when you're choosing colors for the filters you really are trying to show the different details and the processes that are happening in astronomical images but at the end of the day you want it to be very compelling you want it to be very beautiful because space is beautiful [Music] and after those images were processed there was a select few of us very lucky few of us who got to see the first images [Music] so just to make it a little more handy so it's actually higher resolution so we have a team of about 30 people who are producing these images and we feel incredibly privileged to be the ones were the first to see these science-like images when when we saw the first data come down of real targets people were speechless and there were emotions because we immediately we could see how amazing this observatory would be the detail the sharpness the depth and when we saw the first color images we knew that we had a winner and now we are ready to see webb's first image of star dying a planetary nebula called the southern ring let's do it wow wow this this near infrared image is wow the detail [Music] wow okay well here we are we have a near infrared image on our left or on maybe your right and here on the right we have a near-infrared image um and so i'm here with carl our our astronomer uh specialist can you tell us what we're looking at in these images so this is a planetary nebula it's caused by a dying star that has expelled a large fraction of its mass over in successive waves okay so we actually see those waves in these images yes um wow wow and so there's a lot of structure can you tell us a little more detail about what we're looking maybe start with this one on the left yeah so in the in the near cam image you see this kind of bubbly uh you know almost foamy appearance throughout the whole nebula with some very structured shells but the and this foaminess is showing up in orange mainly and this is this is due to the molecular hydrogen that's newly formed in the expansion uh just lighting up the gas and dust of this nebula and then as we move inward you see this kind of very uh blue haze in the inner region and this is actually due to very hot ionized gas that emits well in the blue that's heated by the core the leftover very hot core of this star and what about these like rays that i'm seeing in this image right there so there's also rays in the outer regions that you can kind of see and these are holes in the inner nebula that are actually allowing the the central stars lights to come out and kind of light it up like you know patchy clouds with the sun shining through wow oh yeah that's what it looks like that's so cool um so you're actually a mid-infrared astronomer which is different than near-infrared and so what can you tell us about the details in this mid-infrared image so this is it looks quite different in color partly because we're seeing different kinds of physics going on here so we're actually seeing in the blue you see a lot of blue the blue is actually due to hydrocarbon grains that are emitting very strongly in the blue for mary and they show the very similar structures to what we see in orange and near cam because the the hydrocarbon the molecular hydrocarbon actually forms on the surface of dust grains and so again as we move inward we we see that the inner region is again hot ionized gas but now it glows red because that's where it emits longest for the strongest for mirroring wavelengths okay and then as we go into the center we see kind of the surprise for us which is we knew this was a binary star but we base we effectively didn't really see much of this of the the actual star that produced the nebula but now in miri this star glows red because it has dust around it so in mary we got to see both stars very clearly yeah yeah you can't see it in first image really but there's two stars there so that's a fun surprise um and i think that there's another little easter egg you want to tell us about yeah so this was uh the easter egg is this kind of uh narrow filament up in the up in the top that's radially aligned you can kind of see it very clearly in the mirror image it shows up as this blue blue structure and it points very much to the central sources so i thought oh this must just be a density enhancement in the outer nebula i thought that very very strongly but other people on the team were like no it's a background edge on galaxy well i made a bet that said no it's part of the nebula by the way i lost the bet because then we looked more carefully at both the near cam and miri images and it's very clearly an edge-on galaxy with a dust lane and a bulge so i lost the bet well you lost a bet but you got these gorgeous images so i think it's a win for everybody anything else you'd like to say today i can't wait to see where we go from here oh neither can i alright thanks so much back to you michelle [Music] thank you alex and carl and i have to say that image is absolutely spectacular so as you know people from all over the world are watching us today and joining in in our excitement as we release for webb's first science images we've been checking in with our colleagues in europe and canada throughout the program but we also want to take a moment to include the people at the oh so many viewing parties scattered around the world like stars in the night sky so let's check in with some of them now first we go all the way to perth australia do we have a signal from birth i guess nothing from perth right now maybe we have some of our other feeds we're going to check in with them right now do we have winnipeg canada oh there it is there's australia there's perth hey waving to perth australia thank you so much for joining us today and next we're going to winnipeg winnipeg canada hello winnipeg at a planetarium everybody's enjoying the show i hope okay dayton ohio everybody's watching on the uh there we go dayton ohio hello everybody dayton nice to have you here with us there we go yes hey hey dayton hey they're jumping up and down hi okay all the way bangalore india india bangalore hello hello hello to bangalore india hey it's absolutely wonderful hey okay so i i hope you enjoy the rest of the images we're releasing okay of course nasa's family extends all over the country the team at jpl in pasadena california they're on site to celebrate with us so hello jbl some of my favorite people in the world hey hello and i think the last place we're going to right now is north of grumman one of our major contractors hello north and brumen oh hey all right [Laughter] yay nice to see you northrop grumman all right now there's also a big watch party right here on the nasa goddard campus many of these people have worked on the mission itself we also top nasa leadership and representatives from our government so hello hello watch party at goddard yay okay wonderful so i mean at nasa we are so fortunate to have all of these friends and colleagues around the globe a major partner in the web mission is the european space agency esa contributions have been essential to so many aspects of this project including webb's spectacular launch on the ariane 5 rocket last december i'm very pleased to turn over the show for a few minutes to katie haswell she's joining me from the european space operations center in darmstadt germany hello katie good afternoon thanks michelle thank you michelle and welcome to germany we're at the european space space i'm still getting all kinds of isp from water center it's where the teams effectively fly the satellites a little bit of a cross between air traffic controllers and pilots we have lots of different control rooms here this is the main control room and as you can see today it's not in use so we've been lucky enough to move in here for today i have two very special um experts with me both scientists from the european space agency uh giovanna giardino is a near spec scientist giovanna is uh has been working on that for for many years and lots to tell us about that and mark mccorman is a special advisor for space for science and exploration these two guys have been working on the web space telescope for a long time so we're very grateful to have you with us thanks folks we we are excited to reveal our image with you but before we do that we thought give you a little bit of background um because we've come here today uh because these guys were the first ones to pick up the signal during the web launch when web first launched they run a system called s-trac which is nasa's deep space tracking system and they were listening out when webb called home and uh the controllers here have been looking after a whole very very impressive list of missions since uh 1968. isa has played a very very important role during the web uh for the web space telescope they provided the launch on board the awesome ariane 5 launch vehicle from the guiana space center the atmosphere in the mission control center was electric i can tell you i was there um they've also provided people we have 15 eso scientists working at space telescope in baltimore and also they have provided the infrared spectrograph the near infrared spectrograph and also half of the merry instrument which is the mid infrared instrument let's take a look at those now webb's four scientific instruments include nearspec the near infrared spectrograph led by issa nirspec splits near-infrared light from astronomical objects into its components like a bar code this will help scientists understand the physics of the objects they're observing from their temperature to atomic makeup nearspec can observe parts of an object or the sky using an image slicer and an array of microscopic shutters webb's integrated science instrument module located behind the main mirror also contains miri a mid infrared camera and spectrograph seen here during testing miri has been developed by a partnership between europe and the us miri detects mid-infrared light from planets stars and galaxies it can analyze molecules to help us deduce what astronomical objects are made of and peer into clouds of gas and dust where stars and planets are born together these instruments will help webb detect and analyze light from the very dawn of time revealing the universe as never before so so let's get ready to reveal our image and remember that one of webb's jobs is to find out about galaxies more about the galaxies but also to help us to understand how they change and this image is going to be very very useful for that let's reveal it now there it is it's called stefan's quintet and it's wondrous giovanna what are we looking at yes like it's a quintet so we are looking at five galaxies galaxies are this giant structure that as we've seen we see everywhere around us in the universe they contain from million to hundred billions of stars and in fact we live in one of them the milky way and here we see five of them and this is a closer galaxy in the foreground and these four are at a distance of about 300 million light years from us and they're locked in a close interaction a sort of cosmic dance driven by the gravitational force you can see here these two uh in a process of merging uh within each other this is a very important image uh and an area to study because it really shows that the type of interaction that drives the evolution of galaxy that that that's the mechanism our galaxy's growth i love this image of the cosmic dance moving through each other uh mark there's a lot going on though in this image isn't there there is so this is a near-infrared image and a medium fridge infrared image combined and when we zoom in on the left hand side here we see this foreground galaxy you see lots of individual stars in there actually resolved as point sources which is remarkable then as we pan across we actually see the the galaxies in the the merging galaxies we now see gas and dust which is being heated up in the collision between those galaxies and that's place where new stars are being born today so we're actually seeing the process of creation of new stars in this region and then when we look in the background here we see not only the galaxies at 300 million light years but also stars in our own galaxy these snowflake structures that you see here those are nearby stars but in the corner and around the edges we see galaxies which are much much more distant much further away so similar in some sense to the ones that we saw earlier on in that deep field and so this image actually takes us from the nearby galaxy our own milky way through these galaxies which are evolving today all the way to the distant universe and in a way it captures cosmic evolution of galaxies over those 13.8 billion years so we have another image don't we that we can exactly so so if we strip away the near infrared view there of the stars predominantly now in the mid infrared with miri alone we see mostly gas and dust so we've seen the same galaxies again the two merging and then we also see something very interesting up at the top here because this top galaxy has something new and bright in the middle of it and giovanna tell us what that is yeah that's an active black hole we cannot see the black hole itself but we see the material swirling around being swallowed by this sort of cosmic monsters and gets this gas gets heated to extremely high temperature as it falls onto the black hole and it becomes very bright in fact this is our chinese the galaxy we see luminosity that are 40 billion times the luminosity of our is really really bright and with nirspec we can zoom into this area and we have this technology that allows us to take thousands of image at different wavelength channels so see the uh the this distribution of the gas what's going on in the gas in different region of the of this core area and understand the composition of the gas the velocities um the temperature so that's very important to understand the physics so it's giving us so much information it just shows the power of this telescope mark this is just the beginning though isn't it i think that's a very important takeaway from today you know we these are like pictures just taken over a period of five days and every five days we're getting more data which will contribute more in that in that direction it's a culmination of decades of work but it's just the beginning of decades and you know what we've seen today with these images is essentially that we're ready now this telescope is working fantastically well and you know to to borrow a phrase from a famous rock musician you know we're ready to turn this telescope up to 11. it really is

time it's fantastic thank you very much indeed both of you back to you michelle thanks katie it's so great to have you with colleagues with us on this historic day so before we get to the fifth and final image reveal of the day it cannot be said enough that an achievement like the james webb space telescope is something bigger than any one of us it's bigger than any organization any country this truly takes a planet web belongs to all of us and starting today the discoveries start and they're not going to stop this is just the beginning we've said several times throughout the broadcast that the web mission is about people and during the construction of the great telescope people started to see themselves in it literally day after day people visited the observation window at nasa goddard and looking through the glass they snapped selfies of themselves reflected in the gigantic golden mirror these photos are actual reflections of the enormous human investment and the emotional commitment that brought this mission to life and now years later that mission is finally collecting light from the earliest days of the universe all the way to worlds in our own solar system it's the same mirror that reflected the many faces who see themselves as part of the journey to understand our shared origins let's stop for a moment and appreciate the people behind webb okay it's time now for the last image to be revealed here we go so amber strohn is webb's deputy project scientist he's here with me today to share the final big reveal of the day so amber it is so good to see you how are you feeling oh so great so exciting what what a great day this is yeah so one of the things that we're going to do is before we get to the final image the james webb space telescope has taken us all over the universe today so let's do a quick review of where we've been so far so jane rigby got us rolling today with an extraordinary new deep field image showing us one of the farthest views of the universe ever yeah this image really does demonstrate that jwst can do exactly what we've designed it to do yes and the canadian space agency then took us to the massive planet wasp 96b where the team has detected evidence of atmospheric water and here again we're seeing the incredible efficiency of this observatory we're able to do these kind of measurements in a fraction of the time that we are were able to before and then we zipped up the road from nasa goddard to the space telescope science institute where alex and carl showed us the exquisite southern ring nebula a mixing bowl of stellar matter around a pair of dying stars yeah and i'm just blown away by the level of detail we can see like in the outer part of this nebula it's incredible wow okay after that it was off to germany where the european space agency wowed us with pictures of galaxies interacting and mixing together right and this image again it's just it's incredible because it's showing us one of these fundamental processes of the universe how galaxies merge together and we're able to learn about these processes in a brand new way so the web team has a lot to cheer about right now so across the campus there's this big watch party and we can feel the excitement all the way from over here so let's join that celebration now we're back with senior project scientist john mather along with the head of nasa's science mission directorate thomas or bookend hello so uh john we looked around the world and we're the only ones with the cheerleading crew like over there that's amazing uh look uh you've been with this mission for decades uh how do you feel today i am so thrilled and so relieved this was so hard and we took it took so long it's just impossible to convey how hard it really was that we risked so much to say we're going to go do this and it's so nearly impossible but we did it yeah there are thousands way thousands of ways this can go wrong many of them uh you know we worried about and frankly feared even after launch i have to tell you i was really really nervous and you know it's almost like athletics for me you always get to know the team when they're on the field and on the field they were right after this launch and they were perfect they absolutely were and i really wasn't worried but maybe i should have been yeah that's that's difference between the two of us i always worry i always tell everybody i'm paid to worry uh frankly uh and and and that's good uh what we want to do though is you know just really thank the team again you know of course we heard uh bill and scott and greg talking about the team that is there i think what's also important is to recognize that bernie is sitting there it was the first manager i was sitting there could you stand up and uh and i want to mention that phil stable house who is a manager also during that time is no longer with us but his heart is with us today yeah i have to tell you i have to tell you john after each one of these milestones i called a lot of people i called bernie for example and i called people at my job and people who are administrators because there's many of them and i just wonder how you feel about the team just give you the word here i am just so thrilled that we had a privilege to assemble such a brilliant team we drew from the best of the best and here we are so my extreme deep thanks go to all the people who built that team not only to bernie who started us and helped us build up all the technology to phil who made sure we would have a plan and then when we didn't have quite enough money to build who pulled it all together and made it get all the way to the end i am so thrilled that we had so much talent to draw on and here we are we have the support of the country and the world to take on this immense challenge you know what i'm most excited about there's ten thousands of scientists and frankly some of them just got born or not even born who are benefiting from this amazing telescope because it will be with us for decades it will be and we have it took us about 25 years to get here since 1995 and we have at least 25 to go i hope so look uh we are in a sense of these images the art that is out there in the sky revealed for the first time we're thinking of the team and we're thanking them john thanks to you thanks to all of you and back to michelle thank you so much thomas and this entire collection continues to just absolutely astound me okay amber so here it is can you walk us through the final image reveal absolutely here we go the last image is wow look at that so amber can you can you tell us a bit about what we're seeing here of course this stunning vista of the cosmic cliffs of the karina nebula reveals new details about this vast stellar nursery today for the first time we're seeing brand new stars that were previously completely hidden from our view there's something you want to point out here absolutely so honestly it took me a while to even figure out what to call out in this image there's just so much going on here it's so beautiful one thing that really really stands out to me is you sort of get this sense of depth and texture from this new data um there's just there's a lot going on to call out a few specifics first of all in general the karina nebula is a nearby star forming region within our own milky way galaxy about 7 600 light years away and in this view we see some great examples first of all of hundreds of new stars that we've never seen before we see examples of bubbles and cavities and jets that are being blown out by these newborn stars we even see some galaxies sort of lurking in the background up here we see examples of structures that honestly we don't even know what they are like what's going on here there's just there's the data is just so rich and there's something really special about the infrared infrared can actually see deeper into these star-forming regions absolutely that's one of the great things about infrared is it really does reveal uh what's going on here in a really cosmic sense and in general what's happening in sort of this overall landscape is we have these gigantic hot young stars up here to the top of this rim and the radiation and stellar winds from those stars is sort of pushing down and running into all of this this is gas and dust and of course we know that gas and dust is great raw material for newborn stars and baby planets but there's a flip side to this story and also a little bit of a mystery because these same processes can serve to sort of erode away this material and stop star formation so we have this sort of delicate balance going on of new stars being formed but at the same time the star formation is being halted and for me when i see an image like this i can't help but think about scale you know every dot of light we see here is an individual star not unlike our sun and many of these likely also have planets and it just reminds me that you know our sun and our planets and ultimately us were formed out of the same kind of stuff that we see here we humans really are connected to the universe we're made of the same stuff in this beautiful landscape and actually the created nebula was one of my favorite images from hubble so have a look at this as well right absolutely yeah yeah the hubble image of this is also spectacular we saw it in a different kind of light when hubble uh took an image of this of this particular nebula and then you can see amazing things with hubble but when we zoom in to this new image we're able to see so much more detail and of course all of us you know i grew up on hubble and all of us love hubble and i'm just i'm so excited to see what these two amazing observatories are able to do really in tandem with each other thank you so much and again congratulations it's been a pleasure to be working on this with you i'm just amazed by what's been going on i am too thank you so as we're wrapping up one of the things that i really have to say is the the journey that we've been going on is so very dramatic for me so we've gone all the way from the birth of stars and we have all the way from the distant galaxies to the birth of stars this is where we all began this was the whole point of the james webb space telescope to figure out our origins from the very very early days of the universe to star and planet formation very nearby so right now i'm very honored to have our last special guest this is the administrator of nasa bill nelson an honor to be with you sir hey what a pleasure what what a banner day uh it's clear that webb represents the best of nasa it maintains our ability to propel us forward for science for risk taking for inspiration and we don't want to ever stop exploring the heavens nor stop daring to take another step forward for humanity in the words of the famous carl sagan somewhere something incredible is waiting to be known i think those words are becoming reality absolutely thanks michelle an honor to have you here thank you very much wow so this is a celebration for all humanity if you've ever looked up at the night sky and wonder whoever you are wherever you are this is your telescope and we also salute the thousands of people who have dedicated part of their lives to making web a reality i also want to give a big shout out for the superb media team who's helping web story to the world this broadcast is a joint effort of the superstar producers animators and social media specialists at the canadian space agency isa nasa and especially the goddard space flight center webb captures light in distant colors that the eye can't see and you've actually made this visible to the world so finally if you go to nasa.gov web first images you can download all of the images and data we've just shown in full resolution and check back often from now on we share new discoveries exciting new destinations around the universe july 12th 2022 marks a huge day for science it's only just the beginning for everyone at csa esa and nasa i'm so very pleased you could join us i'm michelle fowler go web [Music] [Music] so you

2022-07-15 15:12

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