![]() ![]() The JWST does more than just capture pretty pictures (actually the pictures that it captures aren’t pretty when they come out of the telescope, NASA artists are the ones who add the color to the images). Seeing the chemical makeup of other planets This image is currently the desktop image on my computer, because it’s so fun to look at. ![]() The JWST’s infrared view provides a more “multilayered” view of this scene than Hubble was able to collect in visible light. Within the cloud are stellar nurseries where new stars are forming.Īs a star is born, it begins to clear the dust in its immediate neighborhood through both gravity (pulling in nearby dusk) and then by pushing away dust with pressure from its own solar wind. While the scene in image 5 looks like mountain cliffs at first glance, what you are seeing is the edge of a dust cloud that is being pushed back by the solar winds from stars in the top region of the image. Image 5 – The “Cosmic Cliffs” region of the Carina Nebula. The five brilliantly highlighted galaxies in the center (and bottom) of the image are in the mid-ground of the image, and everything else is somewhere off in the distance. All of these stars are in the foreground of the image. When you look at image 2 of Stephan’s Quintet, a set of five galaxies, four of which are in the process of colliding with each other, you should be able to easily identify the nearby stars by their diffraction spikes. These spikes seen in the image are not real, but rather come from light that is diffracted as it bends around the secondary mirror supports on the structure of the JWST and from the edges of the hexagonal mirror segments.Īny object with a diffraction spike pattern seen in an image from the JWST will be a star that is in our “galactic neighborhood”, i.e. As seen in image 1 above, nearby stars in the field of view will have an eight pointed star pattern emanating from the center of the star. One of the unique characteristics that will grace nearly every image taken from the JWST will be the iconic “diffraction spikes” that appear around stars in an image. Image 1 – The spikes seen above are not artistic, but rather an artifact of the actual telescope. ![]()
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