20 December 2022
Jacinta Bowler
Jacinta Bowler is a science journalist at Cosmos.
They were published in the Best Australian Science Writing 2022.
In just six months The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has made quite a splash after the first full colour photo drop arrived in July.
Since then we’ve peeped on Jupiter, spotted cyclic carbon circling black holes, taken an incredible photo of the Pinwheel Galaxy, and more.
Here’s our five favourite JWST images for 2022:
Carina Nebula
We’ve got to start with this wonderful, star studded pic of the Carina Nebula. This image was part of the first images to be distributed and shows a young, star-forming region called NGC 3324 that was previously obscured.
This ‘Cosmic Cliff’ showcases JWST’s cameras’ capabilities to peer through cosmic dust, shedding new light on how stars form. And it’s just gorgeous!
Read more here.
Pink Cartwheel Galaxy
This image gets me every time. The Cartwheel Galaxy is a ‘lenticular galaxy’, 500 million light years away in the Sculptor constellation
The image highlights the galaxy’s two rings — a bright inner ring and a surrounding, outer ring which looks a bit like the spokes on a wheel.
The inner ring contains hot dust, and the brightest areas are home to gigantic young star clusters. The outer ring, which has expanded for about 440 million years, is dominated by star formation and supernovas.
Read more (and see a few more images) here.
The Farthest Confirmed Galaxy
This isn’t a spectacular, colourful image like the rest, but it is definitely worth a look.
What you’re seeing is four galaxies which date back to less than 400 million years after the Big Bang – That’s when the universe was only 2 percent of its current age.
One galaxy, called JADES-GS-z13-0, was imaged by JWST as it was 325 million years after the Big Bang. This would make it the oldest galaxy we’ve EVER discovered.
Read more here.
Jupiter’s Auroras
Sometimes you look at an image in awe or wonderment. Sometimes you just think ‘what a show off!’ That second one is how I feel about this image taken by JWST’s NIRCam of Jupiter’s auroras.
“We hadn’t really expected it to be this good, to be honest,” said planetary astronomer Imke de Pater, Professor Emerita of the University of California, Berkeley.
The telescope is made for taking images of faraway galaxies, so the fact that we can image Jupiter at all is pretty spectacular.
Read more here.
Stephan’s Quintet
The image of Stephan’s Quintet composed from JWST data using the Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam) and Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI) was also in the amazing first series of images to be distributed to the public.
However, one of the galaxies (NGC7319) in this group of five, has been found to have carbon-based molecules near black holes, at the centre of the galaxy.
Polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons are small organic molecules very common in the universe (organic in the chemical sense: containing carbon and hydrogen).
But until this new data, from JWST’s MIRI, it was thought that they couldn’t exist close to black holes: they’d be pulled apart instead.
Read more here.