That’s why it’s opaque - because if there is a light source, any photons from it aren’t going to make it very far.” This early stage of the universe is often called the dark age for that reason. “Because of that, a photon can’t travel very efficiently through that medium as it gets absorbed right away. “The protons and electrons were bound together,” Kartaltepe says. This neutral state meant light couldn’t travel far because it made the universe dark and foggy. But as the universe cooled, it settled into a state of mostly neutral atoms of hydrogen and helium. Soon after the Big Bang, the universe was extremely hot and much of the material in it was ionized - meaning that atoms were gaining or losing electrons and had either a positive or negative charge. NASA, ESA, CSA, and STScI How far back in time can JWST look? On Monday, NASA, ESA, and CSA released this image of the SMACS 0723 deep field, an area previously imaged by Hubble, and one of several deep fields Webb will take over time. That means Webb can effectively look back in time to when the universe was in its infancy. “It’s so much more sensitive than what we’ve been able to do before,” Jeyhan Kartaltepe, co-leader of the COSMOS-Webb program, tells Inverse. It will cover some of the same area of the sky previously imaged by Hubble in its own COSMOS program, but at a different wavelength and higher resolution. The COSMOS-Webb program will use JWST’s NIRCam and MIRI instruments to collect images of extremely distant galaxies in the near-infrared and mid-infrared ranges. But Webb is just getting started when it comes to surveying the night sky in depth. It’s a sort of follow-up to one of the Hubble Space Telescope’s greatest contributions to astronomy: the Hubble Deep Fields, a series of images that show distant galaxies in incredible detail. On Monday, NASA - in tandem with the White House - released an incredible deep-field image taken by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), which demonstrates how this telescope will be able to look back at some of the earliest galaxies which lit up the cosmic dawn.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |