Now we can see the (previously) invisible.
NASA tweeted a GIF comparing the James Webb Space Telescope’s new view of the Carina Nebula, a turbulent region of dust and gas where new stars are born about 7,500 light-years from Earth, to an image captured by the legendary more than 30 years former Hubble Space Telescope. The comparison underscores how the powerful Webb Observatory can peer through previously impenetrable cosmic mists.
“When you can look through the dust, that’s when you can reveal even more stars,” the space agency tweeted Monday.
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As the GIF shows, Webb’s recent image of the Carina Nebula reveals a wealth of new stars and richer detail of the region’s thick, swirling clouds.
Webb owes much of its unprecedented viewing ability to the way it looks at the cosmos. Unlike Hubble, which largely sees light that is visible to us, Webb is primarily an infrared telescope, meaning it sees light in the infrared spectrum (on Earth, we can hear infrared light as heat). This allows the instrument to see much more of the universe. Infrared has longer wavelengths than visible light, so light waves slide more efficiently through cosmic clouds; light does not collide as often or is scattered by these densely packed particles. Ultimately, Webb’s infrared vision can penetrate places Hubble cannot.
“It lifts the veil,” Jean Creighton, astronomer and director of the Manfred Olson Planetarium at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, told Mashable last year.
The Webb telescope just started its science mission earlier this month. Astronomers also hope the observatory will uncover some of the earliest galaxies ever created (relatively soon after the Big Bang) and reveal unprecedented insights into the alien atmospheres of distant planets beyond our solar system (exoplanets).
You can see the first images from the Webb Telescope in this Mashable story.