New images from the James Webb Space Telescope continue to surprise astronomers.

Activation of the instrument POTIt has revealed the best snapshots of the universe ever seen from the European Space Agency and the Canadian Space Agency.

“This marks the beginning of a new era, a completely new way of exploring the universe,” says astronomer Michelle Thaller.

But it’s also a glimpse into the past, because some of the new photos are actually a picture of what happened millions of years ago, NASA Administrator Bill Nelson explains.

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“The speed of light is 186,000 miles per second (about 300,000 km per second), and this light has been traveling for 13.5 billion years, just a few hundred million years from the early universe. That’s the threshold we’ve crossed,” he explains.

These are some of the new photos of the Universe.

Carina Nebula

The Carina Nebula, also called the Keel Nebula, was a classic target of Webb’s predecessor, the Hubble telescope.

Carinae is one of the largest and brightest nebulae in the sky, located approximately 7,600 light-years from Earth.

Nebulae are star seedlings. These are huge clouds of gas and dust in which new stars are forming. We don’t see many stars in this Webb image, we only see gas and dust.

Astronomers are talking about a “cosmic reef,” a kind of boundary between dust in the lower half and gas in the upper half. One of Webb’s key science goals is to study how stars form, and Carina is a great place to do that.

The “Eight Bursts” Nebula

The Southern Ring or “Eight Bursts” nebula is a giant sphere of expanding gas and dust illuminated by a dying star at its center.

As stars age, they change the way they produce energy and shed their outer layers. And then when the star gets really hot again, they energize all that matter it neglected before.

The Southern Ring is almost half a light-year wide and is about 2,000 light-years from Earth. This type of structure is called a “planetary nebula,” but it actually has nothing to do with planets.

It’s a misnomer from the early days of telescopes, where they didn’t have the resolution they have today. Webb wants to see how stars are born and how they die.

Stephan’s Quintet

About 290 million light-years away, the Stephan Quintet is located in the constellation Pegasus.

It is notable for being the first compact group of galaxies ever discovered. Four of the five galaxies within the quintet are locked in a cosmic dance of repeated close encounters.

This Webb telescope image doesn’t look too different from the Hubble telescope version at first glance, but the new telescope’s infrared sensitivity will show different features for astronomers to study.

And that was the great hope: getting Webb to work with Hubble. They have different powers, and their ability to compare and contrast will give scientists a new dimension to their work.

On Monday, Webb presented his first deep space image.

What does the James Webb telescope do?

In the image released Monday, you can see a cluster of galaxies in the Southern Hemisphere constellation Volans, known by the technical name SMACS 0723.

The cluster itself isn’t that far away, “only” about 4.6 billion light-years away.

But the sheer mass of this cluster deflected and magnified light from objects much, much further away. This is a gravitational effect, like the astronomical equivalent of a telescope lens.

James Webb, with his 6.5 m wide gold mirror and super sensitive infrared instruments, was able to detect the warped shape (red arcs) of galaxies in the image that existed only 600 million years after the Big Bang (the Universe is 13.8 billion years old). years old).

How does it compare to the Hubble telescope?

You may have heard of the Hubble Space Telescope, launched in 1990.

The instrument has had a huge impact on our understanding of the universe. But scientists are very excited about the potential of the new James Webb telescope and what we can learn as we look deeper into the Universe.

“Webb revealed all the galaxies Hubble couldn’t see, showed details and underlying structures that were not visible in Hubble images, and gave us a great preview of what’s to come,” says STFC Webb Fellow Emma Curtis-Lake. University of Hertfordshire, UK.

Hubble would look up at the sky for weeks to get such results, but Webb can produce rich images much faster.

“What Webb accomplished in 12 hours is truly astonishing compared to what Hubble accomplished in about 10 days,” says Curtis-Lake. “And there is a lot to come!” she gets excited.

“We thought this day would never come”

Jonathan Amos, science correspondent for BBC News.

Three centuries of waiting. It has taken this long to design, build, launch and configure the most powerful space telescope ever designed.

There have been many times during these 30 years that we thought this day would never come; Crucial times when we expect the US Congress to shelve James Webb when the project is so over-budget and so behind schedule.

Thank God they stayed. The first images from the new telescope were impressive, including test images collected by engineers in the last six months of installation.

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Part of that is the incredible detail you can see in images, thanks to Webb’s 6.5m wide primary mirror and high-quality infrared devices.

But Webb’s speed of work is also staggering. While it could generate data in a matter of hours, it would take weeks for Hubble to do the same. I look forward to what the future will bring.