James Webb Space Telescope celebrated on new stamps

By Trevor Mogg Published February 16, 2024

Two new stamps celebrating the James Webb Space Telescope, issued by the USPS in January 2024. — Two new stamps celebrating the James Webb Space Telescope, issued by the USPS in January 2024. USPS

Beautiful images captured by the James Webb Space Telescope have landed on a new set of stamps issued this week by the U.S. Postal Service (USPS).

The James Webb Space Telescope is the most powerful and most advanced telescope ever sent to space, and soon after its launch in December 2021, it’s been beaming back stunning imagery and gathering huge amounts of data that’s enabling astronomers to learn more than ever before about distant galaxies.

The USPS’s latest Priority Mail stamps were issued on Monday, January 22, and feature images captured by Webb that include the Pillars of Creation and the Cosmic Cliffs.

The Pillars of Creation image was captured by Webb’s MIRI (Mid-Infrared Instrument). This is a region within the vast Eagle Nebula, which lies some 6,500 light-years from Earth, and the image shows pillars of gas and dust enshrouding stars that are forming very gradually over many millennia.

The other stamp features Webb’s NIRCam (Near-Infrared Camera) image of the Cosmic Cliffs in the Carina Nebula around 7,600 light-years away and reveals emerging stellar nurseries and numerous individual stars.

“NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope is the perfect intersection of science, engineering, and art as it reveals the greatest secrets of our cosmos through the beautiful images it captures,” Nicola Fox, NASA’s associate administrator of the Science Mission Directorate, said on the day of the stamps’ launch.

Fox added: “With these stamps, people across the country can have their own snapshot of Webb’s captivating images — and the incredible science they represent — at their fingertips, and know that they, too, are part of this ground-breaking new era in astronomy.”

This is the second issue of U.S. stamps to celebrate the James Webb Space Telescope after the USPS launched its first set in August 2022, a short while after NASA shared the first images captured by Webb.

That stamp features an artist’s digitally created depiction of the telescope with a dazzling starscape as a backdrop.

Topics

Tech News

Contributing Editor

Not so many moons ago, Trevor moved from one tea-loving island nation that drives on the left (Britain) to another (Japan)…

Space

The expansion rate of the universe still has scientists baffled

This image of NGC 5468, a galaxy located about 130 million light-years from Earth, combines data from the Hubble and James Webb space telescopes. This is the most distant galaxy in which Hubble has identified Cepheid variable stars. These are important milepost markers for measuring the expansion rate of the Universe. The distance calculated from Cepheids has been cross-correlated with a Type Ia supernova in the galaxy. Type Ia supernovae are so bright they are used to measure cosmic distances far beyond the range of the Cepheids, extending measurements of the Universe’s expansion rate deeper into space.

The question of how fast the universe is expanding continues to confound scientists. Although it might seem like a fairly straightforward issue, the reality is that it has been perplexing the best minds in physics and astronomy for decades -- and new research using the James Webb Space Telescope and the Hubble Space Telescope doesn't make the answer any clearer.

Scientists know that the universe is expanding over time, but what they can't agree on is the rate at which this is happening -- called the Hubble constant. There are two main methods used to estimate this constant: one that looks at how fast distant galaxies are moving away from us, and one that looks at leftover energy from the Big Bang called the cosmic microwave background. The trouble is, these two methods give different results.

Space

See planets being born in new images from the Very Large Telescope

This composite image shows the MWC 758 planet-forming disc, located about 500 light-years away in the Taurus region, as seen with two different facilities. The yellow colour represents infrared observations obtained with the Spectro-Polarimetric High-contrast Exoplanet REsearch (SPHERE) instrument on ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT). The blue regions on the other hand correspond to observations performed with the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA).

Astronomers have used the Very Large Telescope to peer into the disks of matter from which exoplanets form, looking at more than 80 young stars to see which may have planets forming around them. This is the largest study to date on these planet-forming disks, which are often found within the same huge clouds of dust and gas that stars form within.

A total of 86 young stars were studied in three regions known to host star formation: Taurus and Chamaeleon I, each located around 600 light-years away, and Orion, a famous stellar nursery located around 1,600 light-years away. The researchers took images of the disks around the stars, looking at their structures for clues about how different types of planets can form.

Space

See what James Webb and Hubble are observing right now with this tool

james webb hubble live tracker screenshot 2024 03 06 220259

If you're looking for a relaxing way to peruse the fascinating sights of space on your lunch break, then a newly updated tool from NASA has you covered. The Space Telescope Live tools show the current targets of the James Webb Space Telescope and the Hubble Space Telescope, letting you browse the cosmos from the perspective of two of the hardest-working telescopes out there.

You can visit the web-based tools at WebbTelescope for the James Webb Space Telescope and HubbleSite for the Hubble Space Telescope. Clicking on a link will bring you to a portal showing the current and past observations of the telescope and a ton of detail about the observations.