Published on 24 January 2024
Two years ago, the James Webb Space Telescope reached the Lagrange point L2. To celebrate this anniversary, we invite you to take another look at the most beautiful images that the telescope has sent us since it began its mission.
On January 24, 2022, after a month of travel which allowed it to fully deploy, the James Webb space telescope arrived at its destination: the Lagrange point L2, 1.5 million km away. It could only be put into service six months after launch, because the optical assembly and the instruments had to be brought down to a temperature compatible with infrared observations and calibrated. The first scientific-quality image, taken on June 7, 2022, was released by NASA on July 11.
July 11, 2022
© NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI
This first image revealed the sharpest and deepest infrared image ever produced. This is the galaxy cluster SMACS 0723. It appears there as it was 4.6 billion years ago . We see thousands of galaxies there.
The Southern Ring Nebula was discovered by British astronomer John Herschel in 1835. Its diameter is approximately 0.93 light years. The two stars in the centre form a binary star system, the faintest member of which is the white dwarf that gave rise to this nebula.
July 12, 2022
© NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI
July 11, 2022
© NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI
THE STEPHAN QUINTET
A VISUAL GROUPING OF GALAXIES
Pegasus Constellation
The Stephan Quintet initially has five member galaxies: NGC 7317, the pair of galaxies NGC 7318 (A and B), NGC 7319 and NGC 7320. Of this list, four galaxies actually form a compact group and are located approximately in the same region of space.
These are nicknamed the Cosmic Cliffs. In reality, this region is the edge of a gigantic gas cavity within NGC 3324, about 7,600 light years away.
July 11, 2022
© NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI
August 2, 2022
© NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Webb ERO Production Team
This galaxy has a diameter of approximately 188,000 light years, slightly larger than the Milky Way. Its shape is believed to have come from a collision with a small galaxy around 200 million years ago.
The Tarantula Nebula or NGC 2070 is a region of ionised hydrogen in the Large Magellanic Cloud. It is located 160,000 light years from Earth . The rate of star birth is higher there than in any region of our Galaxy. For the first time, several thousand, even tens of thousands of young stellar objects, obscured by dust in visible light, could be observed in the targeted region. The Tarantula Nebula is the largest nebula known to date.
September 6, 2022
© NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Webb ERO Production Team
September 21, 2022
© NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI
This image of Neptune highlights the planet’s rings. Bright spots are seen in the planet’s southern hemisphere that represent high-altitude clouds of methane ice. For the first time, the James Webb Space Telescope has revealed a continuous band of high-latitude clouds surrounding a previously known vortex at Neptune’s south pole.
The pillars are filled with semi-transparent, constantly changing gas and dust. This is a region where young stars are forming.
Along the edges of the pillars are wavy lines that resemble lava. These are ejections from stars still forming.
October 19, 2022
© NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI
November 16,2022
© NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI
This protostar is located in the Taurus molecular cloud. This dark cloud is located nearly 457 light years from Earth. In visible light, it appears as a dark nebula, due to the lack of nuclear fusion within it.
The Small Magellanic Cloud is a dynamic star cluster located in a nebula 200,000 light years away. The gas plumes and arcs in this image contain two types of hydrogen. The pink gas represents energised hydrogen, which is typically as hot as around 10,000°C or higher, while the more orange gas represents dense molecular hydrogen, which is much colder at around -200°C or less. Colder gas provides an excellent environment for star formation.
January 11, 2023
© NASA, ESA, CSA, Olivia C. Jones (UK ATC), Guido De Marchi (ESTEC), Margaret Meixner (USRA)
January 23, 2023
© NASA, ESA, CSA
The Chameleon I Cloud, located approximately 630 light years away, is one of the closest active star forming regions to Earth.
The cold, vaporous material (blue, centre) is illuminated in infrared by the glow of the young outgoing protostar Ced 110 IRS 4 (orange, top left).
This image combines near-infrared and mid-infrared wavelengths of light. The star exhibits the characteristic diffraction peaks of Webb’s Near Infrared Camera ( NIRCam ). The Webb Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI) reveals the structure of the nebula.
March 14, 2023
© NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Webb ERO Production Team
April 6, 2023
© NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI
This image allows you to discover the rings of the planet. On the right side of the planet is an area of brightening at the pole facing the Sun. This polar cap is unique to Uranus because it is the only planet in the solar system tilted on its side, which causes its extreme seasons.
Cassiopeia A is a supernova remnant located approximately 11,000 light years from Earth. Residues of hot dust appear in orange and red. Inside this outer shell are marbled filaments of bright pink. This represents the material of the star itself and it is likely to be shining due to a mixture of various heavy elements and dust emissions.
April 7, 2023
© NASA, ESA, CSA, Danny Milisavljevic (Purdue University), Tea Temim (Princeton University), Ilse De Looze (UGent)
June 26, 2023
© ESA/Webb, NASA, CSA, M. Zamani (ESA/Webb), PDRs4ALL ERS Team
The Orion Bar is a small part of the famous Orion Nebula . In this image is a young star system known as d203-506, which has a protoplanetary disc. Astronomers used Webb to detect a carbon molecule known as a methyl cation in this disk for the first time. This molecule is important because it promotes the formation of more complex carbon molecules.
Rho Ophiuchi is the closest star-forming region to Earth. In the image we see jets springing from young stars. These jets impact the surrounding interstellar gas and illuminate molecular hydrogen, shown in red.
July 12, 2023
© NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Klaus Pontoppidan (STScI)
July 26, 2023
© ESA/Webb, NASA, CSA, M. Zamani (ESA/Webb), PDRs4ALL ERS Team
At the centre of the red diffraction peaks, two stars are forming. The stars are deeply buried and appear as a white-orange patch. They are surrounded by a disc of gas and dust which is continuing to increase their mass. Herbig-Haro 46/47 is only a few thousand years old. These observations allow scientists to understand how stars gain mass over time.
In this image we see Earendel, the most distant star ever detected. This star is twice as hot as our Sun and a million times more luminous. It appears distorted thanks to a gravitational lensing effect. Earendel’s light is in fact distorted by the galaxy cluster WHL0137-08 in the foreground. This causes these strange arcs in the image.
August 9, 2023
© NASA, ESA, CSA
August 21, 2023
© ESA/Webb, NASA, CSA, M. Barlow (UCL), N. Cox (ACRI-ST), R. Wesson (Cardiff University)
Located 2,500 light years from Earth, the Lyre Nebula is the second planetary nebula discovered by Charles Messier in 1779. This new image from JWST’s NIRCam offers unprecedented resolution. The image allows you to see the structure of the filaments of the inner ring.
In this image, dark red regions trace the hot, filamentary dust that permeates the middle of the galaxy. The orange and yellow colours reveal regions of gas ionised by recently formed star clusters.
August 23, 2023
© ESA/Webb, NASA & CSA, A. Adamo (Stockholm University) and the FEAST JWST team
September 14, 2023
© ESA/Webb, NASA, CSA, Tom Ray (Dublin)
This is a young star similar to our Sun. Herbig-Haro objects form when stellar winds or jets of gas emitted from newborn stars form shock waves colliding with nearby gas and dust at high speed. Molecules agitated by the turbulent conditions, including molecular hydrogen, carbon monoxide, and silicon monoxide, emit infrared light, collected by the James Webb Space Telescope.
This is a face of Jupiter that we don’t know. In this image, the white spots and streaks are likely very high altitude cloud tops. We can see the Northern Lights at the poles which appear in red.
October 19, 2023
© NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Ricardo Hueso (UPV), Imke de Pater (UC Berkeley), Thierry Fouchet (Observatory of Paris), Leigh Fletcher (University of Leicester), Michael H. Wong (UC Berkeley), Joseph DePasquale (STScI)
October 30, 2023
© NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Tea Temim (Princeton University)
The Crab Nebula is the result of a supernova explosion observed by Chinese astronomers between 1054 and 1056. It is located in the Milky Way 6300 light years from Earth and extends at a speed of 1500 km per second. The nebula contains a pulsar at its centre, which rotates around thirty times per second.
This view spans 50 light years across the dense centre of the Milky Way. An estimated 500,000 stars shine in this image of the Sagittarius C region. A vast region of ionised hydrogen, shown in blue, wraps around a dark infrared cloud, so dense it blocks starlight far behind it.
November 20, 2023
© NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Samuel Crowe (UVA)
December 3, 2023
© NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Kevin Luhman (PSU), Catarina Alves de Oliveira (ESA)
The Cluster is part of the Perseus molecular cloud. Astronomers scoured the cluster for tiny, free-floating brown dwarfs: objects too small to be stars. but larger than most planets. They found three with masses less than eight times the mass of Jupiter. The wispy curtains that fill the image are made of interstellar material reflecting light from the cluster’s stars.
This region, captured by the MIRI instrument, is a star-forming region that spans 1630 light years. This region would have produced many more stars than the Tarantula Nebula over the past 500,000 years. Webb’s view of N79 highlights the region’s glowing gases and dust. Some still-integrated protostars also appear in this field. Such star-forming regions are of interest to astronomers because their chemical composition is similar to that of the gigantic star-forming regions observed when the Universe was only a few billion years old and star formation was at its peak.
January 23, 2024
© ESA/Webb, NASA & CSA, O. Nayak, M. Meixner
