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It’s not yet clear whether the Seahawks will make it to the Super Bowl, but Seattle is in the limelight for this week’s “Super Bowl of Astronomy,” and there’s already an obvious pick for MVP.
NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope takes center stage at the 241st meeting of the American Astronomical Society, drawing more than 3,400 masked registrants to the Seattle Convention Center to share astronomical research and determine their next move on the final frontier.
The biannual AAS meetings are often compared to the scientific Super Bowls – but the fact that this week’s meeting came just after the biggest event in the football world has led NOIRLab, an affiliate of the National Science Foundation, to call it the “World Cup for Astronomy and Astrophysics.” ” Instead of.
This is the second post-pandemic in-person meeting of the professional community, following the AAS 240 meeting in Pasadena, California last June. The $10 billion James Webb Space Telescope was launched a little over a year ago, but the telescope’s first haul – color images and science data – wasn’t released until July – a month after AAS 240. This is gathering a launch party for this week’s JWST.
Jane Rigby, an astrophysicist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center and serving as JWST’s operations project scientist, said there was “nothing but good news” about the telescope’s performance. “Science requirements are generally met or exceeded,” she said during a general conference. “All of them are beautiful.”
It didn’t take long to see new evidence: A team of astronomers reported that in JWST’s first deep-field image, they identified 87 galaxies that appear to belong to an early universe, just 200 million to 400 million years after the Big Bang. “In fact, very few people expected the JWST to find so many candidate galaxies with such a large redshift in a single shot,” lead author Haojing Yan, an astronomer at the University of Missouri at Columbia, told reporters.
Distance measurements for these galaxies still need confirmation, but even if only a fraction of the candidates are successful, “our previously preferred picture of galaxy formation in the early universe needs to be reviewed,” he said.
Another team analyzed the same deep-field image and spotted types of galaxies known as “green peas”, named after their characteristic shape and color. Pea galaxies are the hotbeds of star formation and have been spotted before in our celestial backyard. But it took 13.1 billion years for the light from JWST’s green peas to reach us.
“We see with detailed chemical fingerprints that these early galaxies contain what may be the most primitive galaxies ever identified. Lead author of the study, James Rhoads, an astrophysicist at the Goddard Space Flight Center, also said in a news release, linking these galaxies to their nearby counterparts from the dawn of the universe to a very large extent. We can examine it in more detail,” he said. .
More findings from JWST came hot and heavy at a news briefing today:
Rigby said the JWST was “really self-acting” at a point of view a million miles from Earth, but that doesn’t mean its first year of operation was uneventful.
The telescope temporarily went into safe mode last month due to a software bug in its position control system, and its 21-foot-wide mirror suffered a visible blow from a small speck of space debris last May.
To reduce the risk of future micrometeoroid impaction, the JWST team will limit the observations that need to be made when the mirror is pointing forward into the so-called “micrometeoroid avoidance zone.” This security measure will take effect from the second year of scientific observations, also known as Cycle 2. The deadline for submission of 2nd Cycle proposals is January 27.
How many loops will JWST go through? Thanks to a smoother-than-expected launch, deployment, and commissioning phase, the telescope has enough propellant to see it in 20 years of science operations—far more than the five years specified as the minimum for success.
“We don’t really know what will limit the entire lifespan of the JWST,” Rigby said, “but we predict a long and productive lifespan.”
