About the James Webb Telescope, there was a lot this year. The most powerful space observatory completed its first year and a half of operation in 2023. What we already knew, he has now shown us with an impressive level of precision. And in those unexplored corners, it has revealed to us worlds that we would hardly have suspected of reaching.
This year, for example, we saw for the first time a postcard of Saturn showing off its 13 rings, thanks to the infrared light sensors with which the instrument is equipped. It has also revealed new details about the deaths of some stars. And it gave us an unprecedented image of the heart of the Milky Way, about 25,000 light years from our Earth, with a level of resolution and sensitivity that only the James Webb telescope can achieve.
But not to mention what we didn’t even know existed. We discover that there is an extremely hot planet out there that rains sand. And that another exoplanet 8.6 times more massive than Earth is potentially aquatic, with a promising environment to search for life.
«The James Webb Space Telescope has transformed humanity’s view of the cosmos.said NASA Administrator Bill Nelson last July, when it completed its first year in operation. “It has allowed scientists around the world to ask and answer questions they couldn’t even dream of before,” Nelson said. Among all
The James Webb Telescope has been designed to have a minimum useful life of five years, which could be extended to a total of 10 years. So there is still much more to see. To close the year, we share with you four Webb discoveries that broke records this year.
1. James Webb Telescope Finds Oldest Black Hole
Yes, a group of scientists discovered the oldest black hole so far thanks to the James Webb Telescope. It is estimated that it was created just about 470 million years after the Big Bang. The discovery was made possible thanks to the combined technology of the Webb and the Chandra X-ray Observatory, both managed by NASA.
The universe is 13.7 billion years old. Therefore, the age of this black hole is 13.2 billion years. In other words, It emerged when the universe was only 3% of its current age.
The black hole was captured at an early stage of growth that has never been witnessed before, where its mass is similar to that of its host galaxy. It is located in a galaxy called UHZ1, which is in the direction of the Abell 2744 galaxy cluster. And there is another fact that surprised researchers: it is huge. It is 10 times larger than the black hole in our Milky Way.
2. James Webb Telescope Discovers Stars in Formation at Record Distance
One of the most recent is the discovery of baby stars in a galaxy 2.8 million light years from Earth. It is millions of light years farther than any observation of newly formed stars made so far.
These “young stellar objects” are in the southern arm of the Triangle spiral galaxy (M33). The astronomers used the James Webb Telescope’s mid-infrared imager (MIRI). They found 793 of these young starshidden within huge clouds of gas and dust.
“Young stellar objects” had not been captured beyond the Milky Way and the Magellanic Clouds. They are the gold standard for tracking star formation in the galaxies.
3. The smallest free-floating brown dwarf
The James Webb Space Telescope has found the smallest free-floating brown dwarf star yet. It is about a thousand light years from our planet, along with other similar stars. Brown dwarfs are sometimes called failed stars: They form through gravitational collapse, but never gain enough mass to initiate nuclear fusion.
This star weighs only three to four times the mass of Jupiter. It was found in the star cluster IC 348, about a thousand light-years away in the Perseus star-forming region. The Webb’s infrared sensitivity allowed it to detect fainter objects, imperceptible to ground-based telescopes.
«A basic question that you will find in all astronomy textbooks is: what are the smallest stars? That’s what we’re trying to answer,” said Kevin Luhman, lead author of the research and a scientist at Pennsylvania State University.
4. James Webb finds hundreds of ancient galaxies
The James Webb Telescope found hundreds of ancient galaxies in two small patches of sky: one in the constellation Ursa Minor and another towards the Fornax cluster. Within this zone, there were more than 700 young galaxies that reveal what the cosmos looked like in its beginnings.
These regions had already been observed before, but 93% of these galaxies were observed this year for the first time thanks to Webb. “These are the galaxies that are starting the process of creating the elements and complexity that we see in the world around us today,” said Kevin Hainline, assistant research professor at Steward Observatory in Arizona and lead author of the study published in June.