Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. Space
  3. News

Here are the cosmic targets for James Webb’s Telescope’s first images

By

This week will see the exciting release of the first science images from the James Webb Space Telescope. The telescope, a combined project from NASA, the European Space Agency (ESA), and the Canadian Space Agency (CSA), was launched in December last year and since then has arrived at its orbit around the sun, deployed its hardware, and aligned its mirrors and instruments. Now, NASA is gearing up for the release of the first images from the telescope, set for July 12, and has announced which objects the images will show.

The first object is the Carina Nebula, a large cloud of dust and gas where an enormous star exploded in 1843. The nebula is famed for its beauty as well as for hosting star WR 25, the brightest star in our galaxy. It is large by nebulae standards and is located 7,600 light-years away in the constellation Carina, visible in the southern hemisphere.

Eta Carinae as imaged by the Hubble Space Telescope’s Wide Field Camera 3 instrument in ultraviolet. The James Webb Space Telescope will image the same nebula in the infrared. NASA, ESA, N. Smith (University of Arizona, Tucson), and J. Morse (BoldlyGo Institute, New York)

The second object is a giant exoplanet called WASP-96b. Located 1,150 light-years away, it is around half the mass of Jupiter and it orbits very close to its star, with a year there lasting just 3.4 days. The data on this planet will include a spectrum, which can be used to tell what an object is composed of. It will likely include data about the exoplanet’s atmosphere, which is one of Webb’s new capabilities.

Recommended Videos

The third object is another nebula, the Southern Ring Nebula, which is bright and a distinctive round shape, made up of gas around a star coming to the end of its life.

The fourth and fifth objects are on a larger scale, including a galaxy group called Stephan’s Quintet located 290 million light-years away which has four of its five galaxies in very close proximity, and a deep field image called SMACS 0723 in which gravitational lensing gives a deep view of extremely distant and faint galaxies.

These images are just a taster of the work that James Webb will do in its first year, and show the variety of types of objects that it can study. The images are scheduled to be released on Tuesday, July 12, beginning at 10:30 a.m. ET (7:30 a.m. PT), and you can watch the release via a live broadcast on NASA TV.

Editors' Recommendations

Topics
Georgina Torbet
Georgina Torbet
Space Writer
Georgina is the Digital Trends space writer, covering human space exploration, planetary science, and cosmology. She…
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.

Read more
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.

Read more
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.

Read more