James Webb tagged posts

NASA’s Hubble, Webb probe surprisingly Smooth Disk around Vega

Teams of astronomers used the combined power of NASA’s Hubble and James Webb space telescopes to revisit the legendary Vega disk.

In the 1997 movie “Contact,” adapted from Carl Sagan’s 1985 novel, the lead character scientist Ellie Arroway (played by actor Jodi Foster) takes a space-alien-built wormhole ride to the star Vega. She emerges inside a snowstorm of debris encircling the star — but no obvious planets are visible.

It looks like the filmmakers got it right.

A team of astronomers at the University of Arizona, Tucson used NASA’s Hubble and James Webb space telescopes for an unprecedented in-depth look at the nearly 100-billion-mile-diameter debris disk encircling Vega. “Between the Hubble and Webb telescopes, you get this very clear view of Vega...

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Astronomers Detect Black Hole ‘Starving’ its Host Galaxy to Death

Astronomers have used the NASA/ESA James Webb Space Telescope to confirm that supermassive black holes can starve their host galaxies of the fuel they need to form new stars. The results are reported in the journal Nature Astronomy.

The international team, co-led by the University of Cambridge, used Webb to observe a galaxy roughly the size of the Milky Way in the early universe, about two billion years after the Big Bang. Like most large galaxies, it has a supermassive black hole at its center. However, this galaxy is essentially ‘dead’: it has mostly stopped forming new stars.

“Based on earlier observations, we knew this galaxy was in a quenched state: it’s not forming many stars given its size, and we expect there is a link between the black hole and the end of star formation...

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SwRI-led team finds Evidence of Hydration on Asteroid Psyche

Computer generated image of Psyche asteroid impact
Courtesy of SwRI An SwRI-led team used NASA’s Webb telescope, shown in the bottom right corner of this illustration, to confirm the presence of hydrated minerals on the surface of Psyche, a massive and heavily metallic body in the main asteroid belt. These findings suggest a complex history for this interesting asteroid, which many scientists think could be the remnant core of a protoplanet, including impacts with hydrated asteroids.

Webb telescope data indicate a complex history for the metallic asteroid. Using data from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, a Southwest Research Institute-led team has confirmed hydroxyl molecules on the surface of the metallic asteroid Psyche...

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Webb admires Bejeweled Ring of the Lensed Quasar RX J1131-1231

Webb admires bejewelled ring
CREDIT: ESA/Webb, NASA & CSA, A. Nierenberg
LICENCE: CC BY 4.0 INT or ESA Standard Licence

This new picture of the month from the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope features the gravitational lensing of the quasar known as RX J1131-1231, located roughly six billion light-years from Earth in the constellation Crater.

It is considered one of the best lensed quasars discovered to date, as the foreground galaxy smears the image of the background quasar into a bright arc and creates four images of the object.

Gravitational lensing, first predicted by Einstein, offers a rare opportunity to study regions close to the black hole in distant quasars, by acting as a natural telescope and magnifying the light from these sources...

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