Washington, July 21: NASA on Tuesday released the next wave of images from the James Webb Space Telescope, which showed distinct signature of water, along with evidence for clouds and haze, in the atmosphere surrounding a hot, puffy gas giant planet orbiting a distant Sun-like star.
"While the Hubble Space Telescope has analysed numerous exoplanet atmospheres over the past two decades, capturing the first clear detection of water in 2013, Webb's immediate and more detailed observation marks a giant leap forward in the quest to characterize potentially habitable planets beyond Earth," according to NASA.
Take Five: Captured in exquisite detail, @NASAWebb peered through the thick dust of Stephan’s Quintet, a galaxy cluster showing huge shockwaves and tidal tails. This is a front-row seat to galactic evolution: https://t.co/63zxpNDi4I #UnfoldTheUniverse pic.twitter.com/em9wSJPkEU
— NASA (@NASA) July 12, 2022
Two cameras aboard Webb captured the latest image of this planetary nebula, cataloged as NGC 3132, and known informally as the Southern Ring Nebula. It is approximately 2,500 light-years away.
"This observation shows the Southern Ring Nebula almost face-on, but if we could rotate it to view it edge-on, its three-dimensional shape would more clearly look like two bowls placed together at the bottom, opening away from one another with a large hole at the center," according to NASA.
"Two stars, which are locked in a tight orbit, shape the local landscape. Webb's infrared images feature new details in this complex system. The stars - and their layers of light - are prominent in the image from Webb's Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam) on the left, while the image from Webb's Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI) on the right shows for the first time that the second star is surrounded by dust. The brighter star is in an earlier stage of its stellar evolution and will probably eject its own planetary nebula in the future," it added.
The first image from the $10 billion James Webb Space Telescope released on Monday is the farthest humanity has ever seen in both time and distance, closer to the dawn of time and the edge of the universe. Thousands of galaxies - including the faintest objects ever observed in the infrared - have appeared in Webb's view for the first time.
The 'deep field' image released is filled with lots of stars, with massive galaxies in the foreground and faint and extremely distant galaxies peeking through here and there. Part of the image is light from not too long after the Big Bang, which was 13.8 billion years ago.
The pictures on tap for Tuesday include a view of a giant gaseous planet outside our solar system, two images of a nebula where stars are born and die in spectacular beauty and an update of a classic image of five tightly clustered galaxies that dance around each other.