Nebula (7/13/2022)

Good morning. If you tallied up the dollar value of lost productivity from space nerds worldwide tuning out work and digging into JWST imagery yesterday, you’d probably get a number in the tens (or hundreds?) of millions.

But, hey, peering back into the beginning of the universe? Priceless. Can't wait 'til the next photo dump.

In today's newsletter:📸 JWST💸 Term sheet

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A Picture Is Worth a Billion Words

A new age of astronomy has officially dawned.

After a long, nail-biting wait, NASA has finally released the first full-color images from JWST, the next-generation space telescope allowing scientists to peer deeper into space than ever before. Astronomers across the world have pinned their hopes on the shiny new scope, aiming to glean precious understanding of planets and celestial bodies far from our own and, if we’re lucky, of the origins of our universe.

The first suite of images did not disappoint. On Monday, President Biden unveiled the deepest image ever taken of our universe (NBD). It captured an area of the sky about as large as a grain of sand held at arm’s length—an area that sparkled with never-before-seen, distant galaxies.

Now we’re getting down to details. JWST’s first observations utilized all four of its science instruments and covered four areas besides the deep field: the exoplanet WASP-96b, the Southern Ring Nebula, Stephan’s Quintet of galaxies, and Carina’s Nebula.

WASP-96b

JWST’s first exoplanet observation yielded exciting results—the first-ever direct observation of water in an atmosphere besides our own. The telescope’s Near-Infrared Imager and Slitless Spectrograph (NIRISS) instrument surveyed the light bouncing back from hot gas giant WASP-96b to suss out its atmospheric characteristics.

• Exoplanet = a planet orbiting a star other than our own.

• Each gas has a characteristic pattern of peaks and valleys on a transmission spectrum, the dataset produced by a spectrograph from splitting apart incoming light into its component wavelengths.

• In the transmission spectrum for WASP-96b, scientists identified evidence of the presence of water vapor.

The Southern Ring Nebula

NASA used the Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam) and Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI) to create two images of a glowing, gaseous nebula made of the material spit out from a dying white dwarf star. That star is—or was, once—very similar to our own sun. In the new images, a second star is visible near the dying star, helping to distribute the material ejected from the first into a vibrant ring.

• Nebula = a cloud of gas and dust in space.

• In the NIRCam image (at left above), the stars close to the dying dwarf appear more prominent, since they emit light at shorter wavelengths.

• The glow of the surrounding gases appears brighter in the MIRI (right) image, including the gases surrounding the second star at the center of the nebula, making it appear brighter.

Stephan’s Quintet

This image of a grouping of five galaxies is the largest taken by JWST so far, stitched together from over 1,000 separate image files and containing over 150M individual pixels. We have NIRCam and MIRI to thank for the composite. The new image shows the group of galaxies in more detail than ever before, revealing seemingly countless stars and trails of gas and dust.

Carina’s Nebula

Last but not least, the new image of the set shows areas of star birth we’ve never seen before in a nebula previously captured by Hubble in lower resolution.

• The image shows the Cosmic Cliffs, the edge of a huge cavity within the even huge-r Carina’s Nebula. The space was carved away by intense ultraviolet radiation and stellar winds from brand-new, high-energy stars chipping away at the edge of the cloud.

• Cosmically speaking, star formation happens very quickly—between 50,000 and 100,000 years for a single star. But JWST caught it in action.

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In Other News

• ESA officially terminated cooperation with Roscosmos on the ExoMars rover.

• Rocket Lab ($RKLB) launched the NROL-162 mission, nicknamed “Wise One Looks Ahead.”

• Space investment is slowing, Axios Pro Rata writes, but VCs aren’t wholesale walking away from the *ahem* space. Shout out to Mo for offering his take to Axios.

• ABL conducted a successful static fire of the RS1 rocket in Kodiak, AK, bringing it one step closer to an orbital launch attempt.

• CAPSTONE completed its second maneuver; the lunar-bound spacecraft is “in a nominal state, healthy, and heading on its ballistic lunar transfer,” per Advanced Space. Lunar arrival ETA: Nov. 13.

• OneWeb joined SpaceX in protesting Dish’s ($DISH) 5G deployment proposal due to frequency interference concerns, SpaceNews reports.

• RFA (Rocket Factory Augsburg) hot-fired its Helix engine for 74 seconds.

The View from the Best Telescopes We've Ever Built

JWST’s first images highlight the contrast between it and Hubble. Webb images in infrared, compared to Hubble’s visible and ultraviolet, and it orbits the sun at a distance of 1.5M km from Earth, ~4x farther than the Moon and 2,700x+ times farther than Hubble.

With its 6.5m-diameter primary mirror, JWST captures a larger field of view in higher resolution. Here, Hubble’s view of the Carina Nebula (above) versus Webb’s (below).

It really is, as NASA has said, “the dawn of a new era in astronomy.”