What Did NASA Discover in James Webb's First 100 Days

on July 12 2022 we saw the first set of images from James Webb the Karina nebula s Max 0723 Wasp 96b the southern Ring Nebula and Stefan's quintet we're now exactly 100 days since those first Five results were released it's time for an update hi everyone I'm Fraser Kane I am the publisher of universe today I've been a space in astronomy journalist for over 20 years now back in early July we gave a detailed description of all of the cool first images that came out of James Webb but as predicted the telescope has been working non-stop producing many many images we've been reporting on them every week on Universe today here on the YouTube channel but if you want like one place to hear all of the updates this is the video for you alright let's get into what we've discovered with James Webb in the first 100 days of operations it's important to understand when you think about web what are the primary science objectives what are the purpose of of this telescope and really has four it really has four main categories that it's going to be looking for it's looking for the end of the Dark Ages the first light and reionization it's looking for the ascent galaxies the birth of stars and planetary systems and the origins of life so when we talk about all of the images and observations and data that's been gathered so far keep those in context with the larger goals of James Webb we're also going to give you an update on how the telescope is doing itself and what does the future hold what other observations are planned for cycle one and into the far future with James Webb all right let's get into it changing our understanding of Galaxy evolution web is an infrared instrument which allows it to see wavelengths that other telescopes have a hard time seeing it could see well beyond what the Hubble Space Telescope can see into the far infrared and when we're looking into the universe the universe is expanding objects which were once visible light have been redshifted out into the infrared end of the spectrum beyond the reach of the Hubble Space Telescope but Webb can see it we've had infrared telescopes before we've had the Herschel Space Telescope we've had the Spitzer Space Telescope but to be able to see into the far infrared with such a large telescope allows us to see very faint objects seen just a few hundred million years after the big bang and so one of these first major objectives of web is to be able to look at the early Universe just a few hundred million years after the big bang itself within a few weeks of those first images that we saw we started to get releases of other galaxies seen at incredibly high red shifts and the redshift is the rate that the Galaxy is speeding away from us and that translates into times when the light was released now for Hubble it was able to see galaxies that were about say 600 million years after the big bang Webb has been able to find galaxies that are around 250 million years after the big bang and this is a very important time because this is the time when astronomers think that the first large galaxies started to come together and form into the larger structures that we see today it was expected that you would see these small irregular galaxies at the beginning of the universe and then over time they would form into larger and larger structures but what Webb saw was that even at around 250 million years after the big bang like when these galaxies are just starting to form they're already surprisingly mature more like disc shaped galaxies the kinds of galaxies that we see in more mature times in the universe and that was a surprise not only were the galaxies surprisingly mature but the stars are surprisingly mature back at the beginning of the universe everything was hydrogen with a little bit of helium and some other Trace elements anything beyond that is metal according to astronomers and it was expected that these first galaxies would be made of mostly much lighter elements but actually what astronomers found was much heavier elements they found things like oxygen which are only produced at the heart of stars that are in the end stages of their life and so what that means is that even at 250 million years after the big bang galaxies were filled with stars that contained heavier elements the Stars had gone through many cycles of birth and death going into Supernova releasing heavier materials that seeded other star-forming regions which led to new stars being formed out of those heavier elements but strangely when you get to Cosmic noon which is about 3 billion years after the big bang the expectations were reversed and so astronomers were expecting during this period this is like the point of the largest star formation this is like if there was a time when the universe was the most exciting the most affirmation it was about 3 billion years after the big bang Cosmic noon but with the Hubble Space Telescope astronomers saw these large mature galaxies and they expected that that was going to be the case that all of the smaller irregular galaxies had merged into the bigger galaxies and were moving on to this more mature time of Galaxy structure but with Webb they were able to reveal all of the fainter galaxies mixed in with these larger brighter galaxies and in fact the story is a lot more complex that there's still a lot of less mature dimmer galaxies mixed in with these bigger brighter galaxies and so what this is all leading to is that the formation of galaxies in the early Universe was more complicated than astronomers were originally expecting that was it that the galaxies formed first and then the supermassive black holes formed in their Center did the galaxies come together as small dwarf galaxies merging into larger and larger galaxies or vice versa the story is becoming more complex not the big bang was wrong complex but at least you're seeing finely nuanced Arguments for and against different methods of Galaxy formation and more research more data we'll be able to fill in all the missing pieces you can imagine this time in a few years when astronomers have this really firm foundational understanding of how we went from the first stars in the universe through the early stages of Galaxy formation through the cosmic noon when you had all of the Star formation going at its maximum amount and then leading to the mature Grand spiral galaxies that we have today and eventually into the elliptical dying galaxies that we know will see in the future another puzzling mystery in astronomy are globular clusters now we see these ancient clusters of stars surrounding most galaxies there's a lot lot here in the Milky Way and what's weird about them is that they are not in the main disk of the Galaxy instead they are mostly randomly above and below the plane of the disc and so they probably didn't form with the Galaxy itself they came from somewhere else some other Galaxy were they the heart of a dwarf Galaxy that was pulled out and it's all of the stars were extracting was added to the mass of the Galaxy and yet the heart was still left orbiting around the Galaxy we still don't really know but we do know that these things are old the age of a globular cluster can be as almost as old as the universe itself and we got new images of globular clusters or proto-globular clusters from James Webb now this wasn't a direct image of the Clusters it was done using gravitational lensing where you had a foreground Galaxy that was able to act as a natural telescope lens for some background Galaxy that contained these protoglobular clusters but Webb was able to detect very high rates of star formation in these objects which shows you the time when these things probably still formed now this is a very complicated very difficult observation to make more research is necessary and I'm sure over the coming years more and more of those pieces will come in but for me personally like I really like globular clusters to know where they came from to be able to watch them coming together near the beginning of the universe is really exciting now I'm sure many of you are here for the exoplanets not the galaxies or maybe you want both but for those of you who want to know about the exoplanets we got a lot of information in that First Data release 100 days ago we saw this really interesting spectral signature of the atmosphere of wasp 96b and this is a planet that contains water vapor in its atmosphere that's cool and not just like there's probably water vapor but a really clear signature that there is absolutely water vapor in the atmosphere of this planet and then a month later astronomers announced that they had detected the presence of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere of another exoplanet called 39b now we see carbon dioxide in the atmosphere of planets here in the solar system there's a very thin carbon dioxide atmosphere at Mars there's a very thick one at Venus so this is a common chemical to see in the atmosphere of a planet but it has never been conclusively seen in the atmosphere of another exoplanet and yet with James Webb astronomers got this clear unambiguous signal that there is absolutely carbon dioxide in the atmosphere of this planet you wouldn't want to live there it is like a Saturn Mass sized planet and it's very hot ordering very close to its star but still the detection of carbon dioxide is very exciting and over time we're going to get more and more lines of different chemicals in the atmospheres of different planets and speaking of chemicals in the atmosphere of a planet astronomers were able to detect the presence of silica in the atmosphere of a brown dwarf sand and is this normal I mean Brown dwarfs are also called failed Stars they're very hot but they're not star hot they're not going through the regular Fusion process in their cores they're going through a kind of fusion where they're burning deuterium in their cores but not full hydrogen to helium Fusion but they do put out a lot of heat and clearly that's hot enough for them to have silica sand in their atmosphere overachieving yeah it's an overachieving Planet yeah yeah all right now the analysis of the exoplanets is mostly done using the transit method you're watching as the planet passes in front of the star you're detecting the chemical fingerprint of the planet when it's in front of the star and when it's not in front of the star and astronomers are able to tease out which of the parts of the planet but Webb is sensitive enough and it has a coronagraph on board that can block the light from the star that it's able to image planets directly and we got to see a photograph of an exoplanet taken by James Webb this isn't an Earth-like planet you're looking at a planet that is about nine times the mass of Jupiter and it's orbiting around an a star which is a much hotter more massive star than the Sun and when you consider the brightness of the star versus the planet it's about a factor of ten thousand in other words the coronagraph onboard James Webb is able to dim the light from the Star so much much that it's able to see the image of the exoplanet but it was able to use several different filters on board James Webb to be able to reveal the planet over and over and over again and astronomers were able to study this direct light coming from the planet now to actually be able to see an earth-sized World orbiting around a sun-like star at around the distance of the Earth you need to dim the light by about a factor of 10 million so Webb can't do that but if you want to learn more about coronagraphs and the technique that will take us there I did a really fascinating interview with Dr Lucy libu she shows an actual coronagraph and we talk about what it's going to take to be able to image another Earth around a sun-like star so we've talked about web looking out to the edge of the observable universe we've talked about it looking at exoplanets but Webb can look inside the solar system too and it has been hard at work Imaging some very familiar objects one one of the first images that we saw was Jupiter and astronomers using web pointed at Jupiter because that's a fairly fast moving object in the solar system they wanted to test how well the telescope can track objects that are moving that quickly they were able to successfully image Jupiter take a bunch of images and you know was it a detailed study but because web is a far infrared telescope it was able to show Jupiter in wavelengths that we just don't get to see very often in addition to really detailed images of the cloud tops and the storms and the Great Red Spot it also showed the auroras on the North and Southern pole of Jupiter which are just these faint ghostly Halos above the planet we also got an image of Mars and this was a pretty tricky image because Mars is one of the brightest objects in the sky especially right now as a recording Mars is fairly close and very bright in the sky in order to be able to see Mars astronomers had to take very short exposures of the planet and then stack them up to be able to get all of these interesting faint details one of the really cool things that they did was a spectroscopic analysis of the atmosphere of Mars and we know when we have spacecraft at Mars orbiting around on the surface we know the composition of the Martian atmosphere very well and so Webb was able to do a scan of the atmosphere from its orbit and from there able to produce a spectroscopic signature of the chemicals that are in the atmosphere of Mars and this is very helpful it's like it's a method of calibration which then we can know as web starts to see similar kinds of atmospheres out there in the universe compare them against the work that it's done here on Mars so it's very useful to do calibration and probably the coolest picture that we got of the solar system was of Neptune we've never seen Neptune in this wavelength at this High detail ever and really we haven't been close to Neptune since the Voyager spacecraft did a flyby in 1989 and it was able to discover the ring system some of the moon's around on Neptune and so here in this image from James Webb you can see the dusty Rings orbiting around the planet you can see one of its moons you can see the storms in its atmosphere which are varying amounts of brightness and it just shows that we need to send a mission back to Neptune there's so many Mysteries to uncover there one last observation that is interesting and that is that Webb participated in the observations of the dart Mission and this was where a spacecraft crashed into asteroid dimorphous changed the orbit of this asteroid avenging the dinosaurs and the world's telescopes both on ground and in space we're observing the impact as it happened Webb was staring both before and after the impact for about five hours of Total observation time it was able to produce 10 images that astronomers were able to use to study the after effects of the dart impact and what's cool about this is that it teamed up with the Hubble Space Telescope this was the first time that Webb and Hubble in image the same object at the same time I'm sure there'll be more Partnerships in the future but it was pretty exciting to see the two great telescopes working together and this was another challenge for Webb because the asteroid was moving so quickly and so the techniques that they figured out on being able to image on Jupiter they were able to apply those lessons to Imaging the dart Mission as the impact happened but maybe you're here for the pictures and there have been a lot of really beautiful pictures we saw the Karina nebula and the southern Ring Nebula in that first release of images a hundred days ago and in the Karina nebula you can see the powerful Stellar winds or pushing the gas and dust forming these giant Cliffs which are many light years across at a level of resolution we've we've just never seen before it's a stunning image I'm sure it's already the background image for many of your desktops a few months after that we saw the tarantula nebula and this is one of the largest star-forming regions in our region it's actually located in the large magellanic Cloud which is about 170 000 light years away and yet some of the most massive stars that astronomers have ever seen are in this incredible star-forming region like it's it's really hard to get across the scale of the size of the tarantula nebula it's mind-blowing and with web which is able to see through the gas and dust you've got the perfect instrument to look at star-forming regions in this image you're seeing stars that had never been seen before because they were shrouded by gas and dust that's the power of an infrared Observatory we've seen several galaxies captured by WEP and the infrared view gives us a different perspective showing the regions of gas and dust where the star formation is happening so here's ic5332 which is a Galaxy about 30 light years away and like here's another one we're looking at NGC 1365 and if you look right down into the center of this galaxy you can see that it has an actively feeding supermassive black hole at its Center and we've seen a few more images from web that have this same tone and when you think about the Hubble Space Telescope you think about these really famous images like the Eagle Nebula The Pillars of Creation you've got this color palette and that's the Hubble palette it's very familiar very recognizable and now as we see these galaxies coming out of web they have this palette and I think once again you're getting this recognizable view to to see these images and go okay that is a web Galaxy picture in fact we put a whole bunch of galaxies and planetary pictures and nebula pictures Head to Head we had a vote on our Channel and in the end the viewers picked NGC 628 which is one of these galaxy images from web so it really looks like it's one of your favorite styles of images as well 100 days in how is Webb doing well we've got some good news and we've got some bad news now the good news is that the Arion 5 upper stage rocket the carried web into its orbit was Flawless the insertion was so good that Webb had to use almost none of its own propellant get into its final operating orbit and so it has many more years of life like originally astronomers were hoping that it would end up with 10 years of time of propellant left in the tank but it looks like it's going to have about 20 years of propellant left and when you compare like Hubble think about all of the observations that have been made with Hubble over 30 years 20 years will be a pretty good run now for the bad news it's taken a couple of hits there have been a few micro meteorite impacts on web most of them have been nothing completely well within the tolerances but one was a little bigger than anybody was expecting and it caused noticeable damage to one of its mirror segments now it has 18 total mirror segments and even on that one mirror segment it's just a slight damage to the segment and it can work around it but you get this slight degradation of the total image quality still well within the bound countries that astronomers were expecting but still a slight degradation and I'm sure over time as more impacts build up on the telescope we'll see further degradation but nothing that is going to take the telescope offline and there's another problem Engineers detected some excess friction on one of the modes of the Miri instrument and based on that they've had to shut down access to that instrument on Miri so not the Miri the full mere answerment just one of its modes and they're still trying to troubleshoot figure out what the problem what's causing this excess friction I'm sure they'll figure it out and then bring the instrument back online but until then all of those observations that we're going to be using that mode have had to be pushed back until they get it operational again that's a hundred days what's coming next web is operating at almost full time day after day after day and there's some really cool sites that you can get to see where the telescope is observing you can see just hour by hour what its targets are what instruments it's using and there's some really cool Target like just this week for example I took a quick look through there's uh an observing run plan for formal Haute which is a star that kind of looks like the eye of Sauron you you're probably familiar with the star wouldn't you love to see the web version of this I would there's also time allocated for this bizarre Galaxy called NGC 7172 here's the Hubble version I wonder what the web version is going to look like but you can also zoom out one level and you can see all of the cycle one papers that web is going to be participating in there are dozens and dozens of sizes and they're broken up by stuff that is inside the solar system outside the solar system galaxies star-forming regions exoplanets cosmology some of the papers in this list are going to be familiar they've already gathered the data and others we're waiting to see it come in so and that's just cycle one like that's just the first year 19 more years after this and as the data reaches the one year mark it gets put out into the public available archives similar to what happens with the Hubble archive you can go through 30 years of Hubble data and you can answer questions that you might have about space astronomy research exoplanets look for asteroids discover Supernova it's all in there in the Hubble data and you can go through it we report on stories all the time where astronomers go through older Hubble data and make some pretty incredible discoveries like plumes of water coming out of Europa or tens of thousands of asteroids being discovered and so we can expect similar discoveries made in archived web data as well as different teams of astronomers get their hands on the data and do their own analysis 100 days are just 100 days since Webb has gone operational and we have seen so many incredible images of nebula of exoplanets objects within the solar system Galaxy seen at the edge of the observable universe it's really exciting and they're just getting started we've got the rest of cycle one and then ideally another 19 years after this and of course I will keep you posted on every cool discovery that gets made by James Webb so thank you I hope you enjoy this overview and I'm sure we will do it again if you don't want to miss any of the news you should subscribe to our Channel we release breaking news about space and astronomy every week answer your questions and interviews with researchers so you can learn a lot more just click subscribe you can also get even more space news in my weekly email newsletter I send it out every Friday to more than 55 000 people I write every word there are no ads and it's absolutely free subscribe at university.com newsletter you can also subscribe to the universe Today 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Channel: Fraser Cain

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Keywords: universe today, fraser cain, space, astronomy, space news, astronomy news, JWST, james webb, nasa, eht, milky way, black hole, milky way black hole, images jwst, what will jwst see, why do we need jwst, why we need james webb, james webb why, james webb images, james webb pictures, targets jwst, targets james webb, exoplanets, trappist-1, trappist, sag a*, infrared telescope, infrared, IR telescope, pillars of creation, cartwheel galaxy, jupiter, mars, neptune

Id: lpJ5x4rcH-k

Length: 25min 53sec (1553 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 20 2022