Star gazers tell us what deep space images from James Webb telescope reveal

From A distance they look like desktop wallpapers factoryproduced by every second computer in the world Yet the five images released on July 12 by NASA mdash of the Carina Nebula Stephanrsquos Quintet Southern Ring Nebula WASP96b and SMACS 0723 mdash bring new information that could change our understanding of the universe The journey of the pictures traces back to 1996 when NASA constituted a committee to build a telescope that could peer as far back as 136 billion light years away a time closest to the origin of the universe Now that the telescope has returned with its first pictures it has opened a new world of researchA world of infinite possibilitiesArvind Paranjpye director Nehru PlanetariumldquoWe have always been trying to understand the structure of the universe soon after it came into beingrdquo he says The visuals captured with the infrared band are sharper images from galaxies farther than ever before Paranjpye reveals ldquoThe images collected are those of galaxies that are very faintly observablerdquo he says This infers that scientists and astronomers have visible proof of elements and molecules that formed in the immediate aftermath of the Big Bang through spectral imaging He says ldquoWe will also learn whether there were star formations taking place and how and whether there was potential for life elsewhere Thatrsquos why these images are causing such excitement among astronomersrdquo Donrsquot get too excited about it he reminds us with a chuckle ldquoThese images are coming to us from the past as well as from far away If you send a message it will only reach 100 million light years laterrdquo The good thing Paranjpye notes is that there might be a possibility that we are not alone in the universeStudy the universeMohit Barhate engineer and amateur astronomerStephanrsquos QuintetBarhate attributes the ability of the telescope to its position ldquoIt is stationed a million miles away at the Lagrange 2 point away from the gravitational pull or effects of the sunrdquo he notes This allows the telescope to capture light waves far better than any equipment on earth or even The Hubble The amateur astronomer is most excited about the red and blue shifts of the galaxies in the SMACS cluster imageldquoIt is like the Doppler Effect of lightrdquo Barhate says adding that the farther a galaxy moves from us the more the bandwidth of light shifts to red and vice versa ldquoWe can note the galaxies moving away from us proving the theory that the universe is indeed expandingrdquo he says Barhate picks up the spectrograph image of an exoplanet WASP96b in the constellation Phoenix 1150 light years away and remarks ldquoThe spectral analysis shows that it has oxygen hydrogen and possibly the early blocks of an environment that could sustain liferdquoStar formations and moreVikram Londhe fellow of Royal Astronomical Society LondonSMACS 0723 clusterNothing reassures faith in physics like the pictures the James Webb telescope has revealed Londhe tells us ldquoIt gives us something called spectras which detect the fingerprints of elements present in spacerdquo he says The image of the SMACS cluster field is the farthest human exploration has gone in all these years ldquoEven that far back in time it shows the presence of oxygen It means the molecular structure was the same 13 billion years ago as it is nowrdquo he notes excitedly This revelation is a breakthrough The astronomer adds that the telescope has also revealed how galaxies collide and reshapeldquoThe Stephanrsquos Quintet image shows how dark energy and dark matter are interacting and how these galaxy collisions are interacting on the elements around them That information was previously not as detailedrdquo The astronomer believes that the telescopersquos ability will only reveal more about the vast universe ldquoThe satellite is reaching out to the early stars which were born just 80000 years after the Big Bang They were the first stars that were born in the universe This will help understand the early star formations and how they might have initiated an entire universerdquo