3/18/2023 0 Comments Webb space telescope![]() ![]() His task is to turn those six black-and-white images into one of the stunning images of space we love to admire. “You get six individual images, each one corresponding to the filter that it was taken with,” he said. Once the data has been collected, it’s sent to instrument teams for preprocessing then, it’s delivered to DePasquale. Each filter was used for a two-hour exposure, adding up to a total of 12 hours of observation time. For Webb’s first deep field image, it took data using six filters, each of which produces a black-and-white image. When Webb observes a target, it will look first using one filter, then another, and then more if required. “It’s incredible that these spacecraft have these moving parts in them that continue to function for years and are flight-ready and radiation-hardened,” DePasquale said. MIRI Filter Wheel (Qualification Model) for the James Webb Space Telescope While introducing moving parts into such a complex piece of technology is always a risk, engineers are well-practiced with working with this kind of hardware by now, as similar filter wheels are used in other space-based telescopes like the Hubble Space Telescope and the Chandra X-ray Observatory. Scientists select what instruments and what wavelengths they want to use for their observations, and the filter wheels rotate to put the corresponding element in front of the instrument’s sensors. To do that, its instruments are armed with filter wheels, which are carousels of different materials which each allow different wavelengths of light to pass through. To gather data on the many different types of targets that James Webb will observe, from black holes to exoplanets, its instruments need to be able to take readings at different wavelengths within the infrared. He told us what it takes to make this incredible data come to life. Processing this data into beautiful images is the job of Joe DePasquale of the Space Telescope Science Institute, who was responsible for processing some of the first James Webb images including the iconic deep field. The data collected by Webb has to be translated from the infrared and into the visible light and processed into an image before it can be shared with the public. Scientific knowledge and creative freedomīut you can’t just point a telescope at a patch of space and snap a photo.Combining black and white to make color.Ĭredits: Credits: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, and Kristen McQuinn (Rutgers University). ![]() This makes WLM super interesting in that you can use it to study how stars form and evolve in small galaxies like those in the ancient universe. Supernovae can be powerful and energetic enough to push material out of small, low-mass galaxies like WLM. Although WLM has been forming stars recently – throughout cosmic time, really – and those stars have been synthesizing new elements, some of the material gets expelled from the galaxy when the massive stars explode. This is because the galaxy has lost many of these elements through something we call galactic winds. (That is, it’s poor in elements heavier than hydrogen and helium.) It’s fairly unenriched, chemically speaking. Many of the other nearby galaxies are intertwined and entangled with the Milky Way, which makes them harder to study.Īnother interesting and important thing about WLM is that its gas is similar to the gas that made up galaxies in the early universe. We think WLM hasn’t interacted with other systems, which makes it really nice for testing our theories of galaxy formation and evolution. It's fairly close to the Milky Way (only about 3 million light-years from Earth), but it's also relatively isolated. WLM is a dwarf galaxy in our galactic neighborhood. So, tell us a bit about this galaxy, WLM. These are large groups of stars – including stars within the dwarf galaxy Wolf–Lundmark–Melotte (WLM) – that are close enough for Webb to differentiate between individual stars, but far enough for Webb to capture a large number of stars at once. We spoke with Kristen McQuinn of Rutgers University, one of the lead scientists on Webb Early Release Science (ERS) program 1334, focused on resolved stellar populations. This Webb NIRCam image of a portion of the dwarf galaxy Wolf–Lundmark–Melotte (WLM) demonstrates Webb’s remarkable ability to resolve faint stars outside the Milky Way.Įditor’s Note: This post highlights data from Webb science in progress, which has not yet been through the peer-review process. Beneath the Night Sky in a Galaxy (not too) Far Away
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