A Christmas present launched from the Ariane 5 rocket on December 25, 2021, the James Webb Space Telescope became fully operational in June and already had enough to satisfy astrophysicists. Just a few of the many unexpected discoveries.
A cluster of massive galaxies forming around an extremely red quasar 11.5 billion light-years away. A quasar is a supermassive black hole at the center of an extremely luminous region. This result will advance our understanding of how galaxy clusters in the early Universe came together and formed the cosmic web we see today.
MIRI, the infrared telescope instrument developed at the LESIA department of the Paris Observatory under the leadership and impetus of Daniel Rouan, the founding father of this new technology, provides a new impressive image of a pair of stars. At least 17 concentric rings of dust ejected from this pair of stars, located just over 5000 light-years from Earth, are from this duo known as Wolf-Rayet 140. Each ring was formed when the two stars collided like rings every 7.93 years near the trunk of a tree.
Preliminary analysis of the spectrum of Mars reveals a variety of spectral features that contain information about dust, ice clouds, the type of rocks on the planet’s surface, and the composition of the atmosphere. Spectral signatures – including deep valleys known as absorption features – of water, carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide are easily detected with the JWST.
The NIRSPEC spectrograph has made it possible to identify the presence of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere of exoplanet WASP-39 b The JWST, the first detection of its kind in a planetary atmosphere outside our solar system. This does not necessarily imply evidence of life on the surface of this planet, as many phenomena, including volcanic ones, can release it as well.