Pillars of Creation: Webb Space Telescope
Source: Indian Express
GS III: Science and Technology
What is discussed under Pillars of Creation: Webb Space Telescope?
- About the New View of the Pillars
- About Pillars of Creation
- About James Webb Space Telescope (JWST)
Why in News?
The James Webb Space Telescope has reconstructed afresh with more depth, clarity, and colour one of the most iconic and awe-inspiring photographs of current astronomy, exhibiting colossal spires of interstellar gas and dust known as the Pillars of Creation.
About the New View of the Pillars
- The fresh view of the pillars was presented by NASA on Wednesday, three months after Webb’s inaugural set of cosmic photographs was unveiled when it began full operations.
Image by Peace,love,happiness from Pixabay - The photographs depict massive, towering columns of thick clouds of gas and dust where new stars are forming in an area of the Eagle Nebula in the Serpens constellation, around 6,500 light-years from Earth.
- Hubble’s visible-light optics revisited the pillars in 2014 to produce a clearer, larger panorama.
- Webb recreated them in the near-infrared spectrum with much more translucency, bringing many more stars into view while revealing new features of the gas-and-dust clouds.
- The new view will assist researchers in revising their models of star formation by detecting significantly more exact counts of newly generated stars, as well as the amounts of gas and dust in the area.
- Infant stars are bright red spheres that emerge just beyond the pillars, where vast knots of gas and dust have collapsed under their own gravity and slowly heated up, giving birth to new stellar bodies.
- Wavy crimson bands that appear to be lava at the edges of certain pillars are ejections of materials from stars that are still developing amid the gas and dust and are thought to be only a few hundred thousand years old.
- The $9 billion Webb infrared telescope, built over two decades for NASA by aerospace giant Northrop Grumman Corp, was launched into orbit on December 25, 2021, in collaboration with the European Space Agency and the Canadian Space Agency.
- It arrived in solar orbit almost a million miles from Earth a month later.
- It is anticipated to transform astronomy by allowing scientists to peek deeper and with better accuracy into the cosmos, to the beginning of the known universe.
About Pillars of Creation
- Pillars of Creation is a Hubble Space Telescope image showing elephant trunks of interstellar gas and dust in the Eagle Nebula, Serpens constellation, around 6,500-7,000 light-years from Earth.
- They are so named because the gas and dust are in the process of forming new stars while also being eroded by light from surrounding newly born stars.
- Space.com rated it one of the top ten Hubble photos taken on April 1, 1995.
- Arizona State University astronomers Jeff Hester and Paul Scowen took the photograph.
- The area was rephotographed by the European Space Agency’s Herschel Space Observatory in 2011, Hubble with a better camera in 2014, and the James Webb Space Telescope in 2015.
About James Webb Space Telescope (JWST)
- The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is an infrared astronomy space telescope.
- As the biggest optical telescope in orbit, its great resolution and sensitivity allow it to see things that the Hubble Space Telescope cannot see because they are too ancient, far, or dim.
- This will allow researchers to look into various aspects of astronomy and cosmology, such as the development of the first stars, the birth of the earliest galaxies, and precise atmospheric characterisation of possibly habitable exoplanets.
- JWST was designed and developed by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) in collaboration with two major agencies:
- The European Space Agency (ESA)
- The Canadian Space Agency (CSA)
- The James Webb Space Telescope has a mass that is about half of the Hubble Space Telescope’s mass.
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