The first results from the James Webb Space Telescope are starting to come in.
The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has survived its perilous journey to its home port in the solar system: a point beyond the orbit of our moon.
From here, Webb can look out into the universe with as little interference as possible from Earth and the sun. You can read more about the telescope’s flight and capacity at forskning.no.
The telescope has begun to investigate phenomena in the sky. Scientists have already provided very detailed information about the atmosphere of a planet far from our solar system, It’s called WASP-39b. There may be many more such discoveries in the coming years.
The telescope was also used to examine the exploding remnants of a massive star called NGC 3132, also known as the Southern Ring Nebula. It is about 2,000 light-years from Earth. According to Space.com.
What you see in the image is a shell of gas that expands after the explosion of a red giant star. Inside the gas nebula are the remnants of a giant star – the so-called white dwarf star.
This is a very dense and small remnant of a star, which has a lot of gravity for its size. It could be as huge as the sun, but as big as the Earth, According to Encyclopedia Britannica.
This type of phenomenon is also called a planetary nebula, although it is a confusing and misleading term. has nothing to do with the planets, As mentioned in the Norske Leksikon store.
The Southern Ring Nebula has previously been examined by the Hubble Telescope. But the James Webb telescope is designed to examine another part of the light that comes from the remnants of stellar explosions, among other things.
This provides the opportunity to uncover new information about NGC 3132, which was selected among the first research projects for the James Webb Telescope. The result has been published in the journal Nature Astronomy.
Investigations have revealed much more than breeders previously knew.
See through the dust
James Webb is particularly well-suited for seeing through dust and detecting structures that can be detected with infrared light.
This led James Webb to discover many new things about the Southern Ring Nebula. From previous Hubble images, it looked as if there were two stars inside the nebula, which is also clearly visible in the image above. One is a white dwarf star, and the other is a much larger A-type star.
But the structures discovered within the Southern Ring Nebula can only be explained by the fact that there are more stars hiding here. Researchers believe there are at least two other stars in this nebula, based on measurements from James Webb.
This means that at least four stars orbiting each other and influencing each other’s surroundings have formed this nebula.
These more precise measurements allow researchers to make more precise estimates of how the Southern Ring Nebula is evolving. Among other things, they deduced that the original star that exploded was approximately 2.86 times the mass of our sun.
Primarily intended as a test and feasibility study, the telescope was used to examine a well-known object. At the same time, new aspects of NGC 3132 have been revealed. So it remains to be seen what James Webb will reveal over the years the instrument will be used.
Reference:
De Marco et al: The chaotic death of a multiple star system and the resulting planetary nebula as observed by JWST. Nat.Ast, 2022. DOI: 10.1038/s41550-022-01845-2. Summary
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