The Webb Telescope Is Just Getting Started

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https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/27/science/astronomy-webb-telescope.html

By Dennis Overbye, The New York Times. 

Excerpt: So far it’s been eye candy from heaven: The black vastness of space teeming with enigmatic, unfathomably distant blobs of light. Ghostly portraits of Neptune, Jupiter and other neighbors we thought we knew already. Nebulas and galaxies made visible by the penetrating infrared eyes of the James Webb Space Telescope. ...For three days in December, some 200 astronomers filled an auditorium at the institute to hear and discuss the first results from the telescope. ...Galaxies that, even in their relative youth, had already spawned supermassive black holes. Atmospheric studies of some of the seven rocky exoplanets orbiting Trappist 1, a red dwarf star that might harbor habitable planets. (Data suggest that at least two of the exoplanets lack the bulky primordial hydrogen atmospheres that would choke off life as we know it, but they may have skimpy atmospheres of denser molecules like water or carbon dioxide.) ...Megan Reiter of Rice University took her colleagues on a “deep dive” through the Cosmic Cliffs, a cloudy hotbed of star formation in the Carina constellation, which was a favorite early piece of sky candy. She is tracing how jets from new stars, shock waves and ionizing radiation from more massive nearby stars that were born boiling hot are constantly reshaping the cosmic geography and triggering the formation of new stars. ...The telescope’s flawless launch, Dr. Rigby reported, has left it with enough maneuvering fuel to keep it working for 26 years or more. ...Perhaps the biggest surprise from the Webb telescope so far involves events in the early millenniums of the universe. Galaxies appear to have been forming, generating and nurturing stars faster than battle-tested cosmological models estimated. “How did galaxies get so old so fast?” asked Adam Riess, a Nobel Physics laureate and cosmologist from Johns Hopkins University who dropped in for the day.... 

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