James Webb telescope marks 1 year of peering into far reaches of the universe

Astronomers and fans of the stunning images of deep space celebrate the first year of operation of the James Webb Space Telescope this week.

A year ago on Wednesday, the first statue was solemnly unveiled at the White House by US President Joe Biden and NASA Administrator Bill Nelson.

The $10 billion US telescope is the successor to the aging Hubble Space Telescope, which launched into orbit in 1990. Both the Hubble and Webb telescopes use a series of curved mirrors instead of lenses to reflect light captured by powerful sensors and instruments to produce their mesmerizing images.

According to the North Americans Space Agency (NASA), the JWST has a much larger primary mirror than Hubble, ultimately allowing it to absorb more light from further away.

“In just one year, the James Webb Space Telescope has transformed humanity’s view of the cosmos, peering into clouds of dust for the first time and seeing light from far reaches of the universe.” Nelson said in a press release accompanying the telescope’s latest image.

The image of the Rho Ophiuchi cloud complex, the closest star-forming region to Earth about 390 light-years away, illustrates the power of the telescope.

Here are some highlights from JWST’s first year releases.

(NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Webb ERO production team/Handout via Reuters)

The first color image from the Webb telescope, a revolutionary device designed to look back across the cosmos to the dawn of the universe, shows the galaxy cluster SMACS 0723, known as Webb’s First Deep Field, in a composite made of images at various wavelengths taken with a near-infrared camera and released on July 11, 2022.

(Handout/NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Webb ERO production team/Reuters)

The cosmic cliffs of the Carina Nebula can be seen in an image divided horizontally by a wavy line between a cloudscape forming a nebula along the lower portion and a relatively bright upper portion, with data from the Webb Telescope, released July 12 2022.

(Handout/NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Webb ERO production team/Reuters)

View of M74, also known as the Ghost Galaxy, in an image released on August 29, 2022. Webb’s sharp view reveals delicate filaments of gas and dust in the spiral arms that spiral outward from the center of this image.

(L. Armus/ESA, Webb, NASA & CSA)

In this image, taken on November 30, 2022, two merging galaxies collide. This pair of galaxies, known to astronomers as II ZW 96, is about 500 million light-years from Earth and is located in the constellation Delphinus, close to the celestial equator.

(L. Armus/ESA, Webb, NASA & CSA)

An hourglass-shaped multicolored cloud against the black starry background of space in this image taken on November 16, 2022. This cloud of dust and gas is illuminated by the light of a protostar, a star in its earliest stages of formation.

(NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI)

A combination of images of the iconic Pillars of Creation from two cameras aboard the Webb telescope framing the universe in its infrared glory. Webb’s near-infrared image was merged with the mid-infrared image, setting this star-forming region ablaze with new detail on November 30, 2022.

(Joseph DePasquale, Alyssa Pagan, Anton M. Koekemoer/STScI)

In this September 6, 2022 image, thousands of never-before-seen young stars are depicted in the Tarantula Nebula. The telescope revealed details of the nebula’s structure and composition, as well as dozens of background galaxies.

(NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Webb ERO production team)

This August 22, 2022 image of the planet Jupiter comes from the near-infrared camera (NIRCam), which has three specialized infrared filters that show details of the planet. Since infrared light is invisible to the human eye, the light has been mapped onto the visible spectrum.

(NASA, ESA, CSA, Jupiter ERS Team; image processing by Ricardo Hueso (UPV/EHU) and Judy Schmidt)

JWST turned to Saturn in June 2023 to search deep for new ring structures and faint moons. Saturn itself appears extremely dark at the infrared wavelengths observed by JWST’s near-infrared camera, as methane gas absorbs nearly all of the sunlight that falls on the atmosphere. Several very deep images of Saturn taken along with this image were designed to test JWST’s ability to detect faint moons around the planet and its bright rings.