James Webb Telescope's Best Images and Discoveries So Far

As the James Webb Space Telescope enters its second year of capturing images of the depths of space, it has already revealed a treasure trove of beauty from around the universe, both near and far from home.

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) was launched on Christmas Day in 2021, and sent back its first batch of images on July 12, 2022, making this July its functional birthday.

This telescope, now situated around 1 million miles from Earth as it photographs the cosmos, is the successor space telescope to Hubble, designed to peer far back into the universe's history and study the earliest stars and galaxies.

Here, we reveal some of the most beautiful and impressive shots taken by the JWST in its first year of service.

Cartwheel Galaxy

Taken using Webb's Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam) and Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI), this image shows the Cartwheel Galaxy and its companions. This galaxy, situated around 500 million light-years away in the Sculptor constellation, is thought to have been formed due to a collision of two galaxies approximately 400 million years ago, resulting in its wagon-wheel shape.

The JWST image shows a great degree of detail from within the galaxy, including its inner ring and outer ring, which expand outwards from the site of the collision like ripples in a pond.

It also shows the hot dust and young star clusters near the galaxy's core, and star formation and supernovas in the outer ring.

Pillars of Creation

Taken on Webb's NIRCam, this image revisits the famous Hubble image of the pillars of creation first taken in 1995, and followed up in 2014.

The Pillars of Creation are perhaps some of the most well-known objects in the universe thanks to their staggering beauty. Located in the Eagle Nebula, some 6,500 light-years away from Earth, they are huge clouds of molecular hydrogen and dust, within which many stars are being born. The leftmost pillar alone is about four light-years long.

The JWST image looks through more of the dust of this stellar nursery, showing inside the thick brown pillars to show forming nascent stars within.

Jupiter in a New Light

The JWST has been revealing details about planetary neighbors in our own solar system.

Using its NIRCam, a composite infrared image was taken of the largest planet in our solar system, Jupiter, showing it in a whole new light.

"We hadn't really expected it to be this good, to be honest," said planetary astronomer Imke de Pater, professor emerita of the University of California, Berkeley, in an August 2022 statement. "It's really remarkable that we can see details on Jupiter together with its rings, tiny satellites, and even galaxies in one image."

DART Impact

Also closer to home, the JWST lent an eye to the DART (Double Asteroid Redirection Test) experiment in September 2022, when NASA crashed a spacecraft into Dimorphos, an asteroid moonlet in the double-asteroid system of Didymos.

The JWST's NIRCam showed plumes of ejecta floating away from the site of the impact on the asteroid for hours after the collision.

"I have nothing but tremendous admiration for the Webb Mission Operations folks that made this a reality," principal investigator Cristina Thomas of Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff, Arizona, said in a statement. "We have been planning these observations for years, then in detail for weeks, and I'm tremendously happy this has come to fruition."

Carina Nebula

Also known as the "cosmic cliffs," the Carina Nebula is situated around 8,500 light years away from Earth. These enormous clouds of gas and dust are incomprehensively large: the "peaks" of the cliffs reach around 7 light-years high.

This nebula is another stellar nursery, home to newborn stars that are themselves eroding the nebula due to their intense ultraviolet radiation.

This JWST image allows an infrared view of the nebula, showing detail not available using visible light, including protostellar jets shooting from many of the young stars.

A Star Is Born

The JWST also shows the details of these newborn stars, as seen in this image of a protostar within the dark cloud L1527. The hourglass-shaped clouds of dust flank the protostar, illuminated by the star's light. This star and its cloud are only around 100,000 years old, making them very young on a cosmological scale: the star itself is considered a class 0 protostar, in the earliest stage of formation.

For now, this protostar cannot generate enough of its own energy from nuclear fusion, so remains a hot ball of gas between 20 and 40 percent of our own sun's mass. Eventually, the temperature of the star will reach a threshold high enough for nuclear fusion, and the star will properly ignite.

Mirror Selfie

Naturally, the JWST had to take a selfie using its primary mirror. This image was taken using a specialized pupil imaging lens inside of the NIRCam instrument, designed specifically to image the mirror in engineering and alignment.

Other than all these spectacular images, the JWST has also contributed to a number of scientific findings and discoveries, including the most distant active black hole ever observed, details of the atmospheres of far-off exoplanets, and a vast number of ancient galaxies.

Astronomers hope to carry on using this revolutionary telescope to discover more fascinating objects and findings out in the cosmos, furthering our understanding of the vast universe and how it works.

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