On 25 December 2021, NASA, together with ESA and CSA launched a 6 tone device into a halo orbit around the second lagrange point (L2), for conducting infrared astronomy. That is approximately 1,500,000 km beyond the orbit of Earth.

The cost was $10B, about $9B more than the initially planned $1 billion budget. But it seems that humanity was more than happy to pay that amount for something that can generate a weekly background for our desktops.

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The James Webb Space Telescope is a Marvelous Piece of Engineering

From launch until reaching its desired orbit, the telescope passed more than 300 different stages, so many things could break, but the telescope triumphed. It reached L2 successfully and began its cooldown and alignment procedures.

The primary mirror of the telescope is a 6.5 m (21 ft)-diameter, gold-coated beryllium reflector with a collecting area of 25.4 m2 (273 sq ft). The mirror is composed of 18 hexagonal segments to make it practical launching into space.

It has a five-layer sunshield, each layer as thin as a human hair; it was built out of Kapton E, a commercially available polyimide film from DuPont Corporation. It is an American company that was established in July 1802 in Wilmington, Delaware. This was 220 years ago, traded on the NYSE under the symbol DD.

Carina Nebula (NGC 3324)

This landscape of “mountains” and “valleys” speckled with glittering stars is actually the edge of a nearby, young, star-forming region called NGC 3324 in the Carina Nebula. Captured in infrared light by NASA’s new James Webb Space Telescope, this image reveals for the first time previously invisible areas of star birth.

Stephan’s Quintet or Hickson Compact Group 92 (HCG 92)

With its powerful, infrared vision and extremely high spatial resolution, Webb shows never-before-seen details in this galaxy group. Sparkling clusters of millions of young stars and starburst regions of fresh star birth grace the image. Sweeping tails of gas, dust and stars are being pulled from several of the galaxies due to gravitational interactions. Most dramatically, Webb captures huge shock waves as one of the galaxies, NGC 7318B, smashes through the cluster.

Although called a “quintet,” only four of the galaxies are truly close together and caught up in a cosmic dance. The fifth and leftmost galaxy, called NGC 7320, is well in the foreground compared with the other four. NGC 7320 resides 40 million light-years from Earth, while the other four galaxies (NGC 7317, NGC 7318A, NGC 7318B, and NGC 7319) are about 290 million light-years away. This is still fairly close in cosmic terms, compared with more distant galaxies billions of light-years away. Studying such relatively nearby galaxies like these helps scientists better understand structures seen in a much more distant universe.

This proximity provides astronomers a ringside seat for witnessing the merging and interactions between galaxies that are so crucial to all of galaxy evolution. Rarely do scientists see in so much detail how interacting galaxies trigger star formation in each other, and how the gas in these galaxies is being disturbed. Stephan’s Quintet is a fantastic “laboratory” for studying these processes fundamental to all galaxies.

Southern Ring Nebula (NGC 3132)

The dimmer star at the center of this scene has been sending out rings of gas and dust for thousands of years in all directions, and NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has revealed for the first time that this star is cloaked in dust.

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.

SMACS 0723 Galaxy Cluster

This image shows the galaxy cluster SMACS 0723 as it appeared 4.6 billion years ago, with many more galaxies in front of and behind the cluster. Much more about this cluster will be revealed as researchers begin digging into Webb’s data. This field was also imaged by Webb’s Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI), which observes mid-infrared light.

Light from these galaxies took billions of years to reach us. We are looking back in time to within a billion years after the big bang when viewing the youngest galaxies in this field. The light was stretched by the expansion of the universe to infrared wavelengths that Webb was designed to observe. Researchers will soon begin to learn more about the galaxies’ masses, ages, histories, and compositions.

Credits: NASA, ESA, CSA.