James Webb Space Telescope tagged posts

James Webb Space Telescope detects Water Vapor, Sulfur Dioxide and Sand Clouds in the Atmosphere of a nearby Exoplanet

A transmission spectrum of the warm Neptune exoplanet WASP-107b, captured by the Low Resolution Spectrometer (LRS) of the Mid InfraRed Instrument (MIRI) on board JWST, reveals evidence for water vapour, sulfur dioxide, and silicate (sand) clouds in the planet’s atmosphere.

European astronomers, co-led by researchers from the Institute of Astronomy, KU Leuven, used recent observations made with the James Webb Space Telescope to study the atmosphere of the nearby exoplanet WASP-107b. Peering deep into the fluffy atmosphere of WASP-107b they discovered not only water vapour and sulfur dioxide, but even silicate sand clouds. These particles reside within a dynamic atmosphere that exhibits vigorous transport of material.

Astronomers worldwide are harnessing the advanced capabilities of...

Read More

Second-most Distant Galaxy discovered using James Webb Space Telescope

composite image of pandora's cluster, with two close-up inset images
The second- and fourth-most distant galaxies ever seen (UNCOVER z-13 and UNCOVER z-12) have been confirmed using the James Webb Space Telescope’s Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam). The galaxies are located in Pandora’s Cluster (Abell 2744), shown here as near-infrared wavelengths of light that have been translated to visible-light colors. The scale of the main cluster image is labelled in arcseconds, which is a measure of angular distance in the sky. The circles on the black-and-white images, showing the galaxies in the NIRCam-F277W filter band onboard JWST, indicate an aperture size of 0.32 arcsec. Credit: Cluster image: NASA, UNCOVER (Bezanson et al., DIO: 10.48550/arXiv.2212.04026). Insets: Nasa, UNCOVER (Wang et al., 2023). Composition: Dani Zemba/Penn State. All Rights Reserved.
...Read More

Webb reveals Intricate Details in the Remains of a Dying Star

Side-by-side images of the Ring Nebula where the nebula appears as a distorted doughnut. On the right, the nebula’s inner cavity hosts shades of blue and green, while the detailed ring transitions through shades of orange in the inner regions and pink in the outer region. On the left, the nebula’s inner cavity hosts shades of red and orange, while the detailed ring transitions through shades of yellow in the inner regions and blue/purple in the outer region. The ring’s inner region has distinct filament elements.
New images from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope of the well-known Ring Nebula provide unprecedented spatial resolution and spectral sensitivity. In the NIRCam (Near-Infrared Camera) image on the left, the intricate details of the filament structure of the inner ring are particularly visible in this dataset. On the right, the MIRI (Mid-InfraRed Instrument) image reveals particular details in the concentric features in the outer regions of the nebulae’s ring. Download the full-resolution NIRCam image and the full-resolution MIRI image from the Image gallery. Credit: ESA/Webb, NASA, CSA, M. Barlow (University College London), N. Cox (ACRI-ST), R. Wesson (Cardiff University).

NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope obtained images of the Ring Nebula, one of the best-known examples of a pla...

Read More

XRISM Spacecraft will Open New Window on the Xray Cosmos

Scientists studied NGC 7319, part of the visual grouping of galaxies called Stephan’s Quintet, using the Medium-Resolution Spectrometer (MRS) in the Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI) on NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope. The galaxy contains a supermassive black hole that is actively accreting material. The spectrometer features integral field units (IFUs) – each containing a camera and spectrograph. IFUs provided the Webb team with a collection of images of the galactic core’s spectral features, shown here. Blue-colored regions indicate movement toward the viewer and orange-colored regions represent movement away from the viewer. Powerful radiation and winds from the black hole ionize hot spots of super-heated gas, creating the argon and neon lines...
Read More