Everything NASA Discovered from James Webb's First Year in Space [4K]

It has been a

year

of observations from the James Webb Space Telescope and what a

year

there have been so many interesting observations, discoveries, images of nebulae, galaxies, clusters, images within the solar system, newly formed planets, detection of fascinating chemicals in the atmospheres of planets around other worlds and this. It's only the

first

year, some of the observations were pretty much what we expected to see and others were complete surprises, things that will impact cosmology for years to come, so with this episode we'll give you a full look back. what happened during the

first

year of observations with all the great images, the interesting scientific results, the new discoveries, the things that make you scratch your head and think what and some of the problems the telescope experienced and what the future holds For the year. two now, if you were really excited about the release of jwst but didn't catch many of the great stories that emerged throughout the year, this is a chance for you to fully catch up, you'll be able to talk to your friends, understand all the science that was done throughout the year and if you just want a reminder, if you want to be a little nostalgic about some of the amazing discoveries, the really interesting images that we saw this year, this video. is for you, so let's start with the images.

The first image I want to see and this has to be one of the best photographs taken all year is of the Tarantula Nebula and the Tarantula Nebula is one of the largest star forming regions. What astronomers have ever

discovered

is located in the large Magellanic Cloud, which is a few hundred thousand light years from Earth, so it's not even inside our galaxy, it's in a completely separate galaxy and, However, it is so big that there are so many stars making up many of them. which are dozens of times the mass of the Sun, you'll hear me say this many times and that is that jwst is equipped with a variety of infrared instruments and infrared is this wavelength of light that allows you to see through the gas and dust that you normally They obscure places like star-forming regions, so under the Hubble Space Telescope you might see this mass of dust, but with James Webb you can look through the dust and see the stars as they form inside these cocoons. of the nebula and in this image of the Tarantula Nebula you can see all these knots and regions where new stars are forming.

You can see through the gas and dust some of these protostars as they expel radiation that pushes the nebula away. material and exposing the stars and over time these giant dust cavities will become larger and larger, revealing all the stars. This is one of those images where you can find the full resolution image and it measures 14,000 pixels by 8,000 pixels. Along this was one of the first photographs taken by jwst, it's just that the astronomers decided to publish the image of the Karina Nebula first and keep it until later, while the Tarantula Nebula is probably the most star-forming region. important that it exists.

We know that the Orion Nebula is probably the most famous, so it was inevitable that astronomers would head straight for the Orion Nebula and the Orion Nebula is a familiar object in the night sky. If you have dark skies, you can actually see it. the sky with your own eyes, but you can definitely see it with binoculars or a small telescope, so this image is a region called the Orion bar and you can compare this image taken by Webb and the one that was taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. You see these bright stars and how they line up and then when you see that comparison it really gives you an idea of ​​how good the optics are on jdbst versus the optics on Hubble, the whole main structure is there, it's like they are in better condition . focus and that's the power of a 6.5-meter mirror compared to Hubble's eight-foot mirror, so one of the coolest images to come out this year is of a Rye WR 140 wolf star.

Now, wolfry stars, these are really newly formed stars. There is incredibly hot heat that emits a huge amount of radiation and when astronomers looked at this original image of the star, they noticed these strange concentric rings and this is not like an artifact in the image, this is real, there are actually these rings in the nebula. material around this star, so what is happening in the star has a binary companion and the star is ejecting this nebula material into this Cloud around it and then this stellar companion moves through this material and carves rings to size moving forward and so you get this ring after ring after ring is like measuring tree rings to calculate the age of a tree, but in this case you know that this binary companion flies by the star every eight years, so every One of these rings coincides with eight years of the stellar evolution of this young star.

The most iconic photograph taken by the Hubble Space Telescope has to be the Pillars of Creation. This is another region of star formation. In this case, you're looking at the Eagle Nebula, which you can see in a small telescope, and in fact, with a small telescope and if you have a camera attached, you actually take pictures of the Pillars of Creation, but nothing like this, and that's why I mentioned earlier about the tarantula nebula, how these stars create these really powerful stellar winds. Well, these stellar winds can shape the structure of the nebula around them and so the Pillars of Creation are these places where at the top you have this newly formed star that is surrounded by this envelope of gas and dust, but then the collective The power of all the other stars in the nebula is flying like the wind, as if flying with sand, this material forms like the tail of a comet, a column that moves away from the star and Astronomers think that in fact these pillars as we see them today have already collapsed due to powerful stellar winds, it will take us a few thousand years to see a newer version and once again, with the original Hubble version you got this wonderful image and then James Webb appears and takes an even higher view. resolution of the image that also sees through some of the gas and dust that is obscured by the Hubble Space Telescope, so you see higher resolution, but you also have almost X-ray vision to be able to see these regions of star formation and James Webb is equipped with multiple instruments that are good at different things, so in the first image this was taken using the near camera, the near infrared astronomy camera, in this second image you are looking at the image using the mid-infrared instrument or Miriam, so it's a different wavelength of infrared light and with Miri you get all the gas and dust surrounding the stars, but the stars themselves disappear because they're no longer covered by the gas and the dust and they just don't look bright in this mid-infrared, etc.

Different wavelengths of light as they enter the network reveal different parts of the nebula, and of course astronomers can use this to learn much more about what is happening in the star-forming region. James Webb has focused on newly formed stars that are not surrounded by clouds of gas and dust and, in this case, you are looking at a protostar. It is designated as a class zero protostar, meaning that the star is only about a hundred thousand years old and is located about 430 light years away. From Earth, the star is surrounded by an accretion disk, this type of disk of material that is attracted towards the star to increase its size and this is where we would expect to see planets starting to form around the star and then field lines magnetic.

They are launching this material along the poles of the star as it blasts off into

space

. If you could go back in time and watch the Sun as it was forming in the solar nebula, this is the kind of thing you could see in just a few hundred thousand. Years after the solar system began to form, James Webb saw many galaxies and when you see these images, they are instantly recognizable. I call this the Eldritch horror version of astrophotography because the colors are this kind of dark purple and salmon color. and in a way they make you think of a kind of gothic horror.

Okay, big props to Judy Schmidt, who is an imaging specialist and pioneered much of the early work with images from the James Webb Space Telescope before astronomers and Judy, visualization specialists working at

space

agencies and universities , was there looking at the data coming out of the telescope and putting together images that we could see, so the colors are very recognizable because the regions of a galaxy light up in the infrared. The spectrum is again these areas of gas and dust, less of the older, brighter stars and more of the regions where these stars are forming, and often stars form in the galactic arms of their galaxy, so so James Webb's pictures actually show where the arms are located.

The galaxy is where star formation occurs, where we can expect to see future regions of star formation. It's like the skeleton of a galaxy. Not only is James Webb a powerful telescope, but when aligned with a gravitational lens it becomes an incredibly powerful telescope. where you're using the gravity of an entire galaxy cluster as the lens of a natural telescope and with that you can look at objects on the other side of the lens more precisely to see what types of elements are in these distant galaxies that you would just use. You can't see it with the capability of the telescope itself, but you get other advantages too, and in this case, James Webb was able to see multiple versions of the same supernova exploding in a galaxy because the light has to follow a different path. path around this gravitational lens around this cluster, so astronomers were able to see a type 1A supernova shooting in a galaxy that was covered by a galaxy cluster and they were able to see it shoot several times depending on the length of the trip it took. . that the light had to take to go around the galaxy.

This is just amazing, as you know, not a James Webb thing, but simply the fact that you can use the gravity of a galaxy cluster as a natural telescope to be able to see objects tens of thousands of times better than with just your telescope. , like we don't know what dark matter is, but we can use it as a telescope. This image will look instantly recognizable as a James Webb image because you see that six-sided star and of course that comes from the hexagonal shape in the mirrors that give all the shiny objects in images on the web this image of very distinctive six-pointed star and in fact if you look very closely there are actually two additional lines that come from the struts that hold up the secondary mirror on James What and this is an object known as ARP 220 which is two galaxies colliding each other and the resulting fusion is so bright that it is starting to overwhelm jwst's sensors to be able to display these images that we have seen. this image in visible light and okay, you know, it's cool to see two galaxies coming together, but because you have all this gas and dust together, it's incredibly bright in the infrared, it shines with the light of a trillion suns, about a hundred . times brighter than the Milky Way would look and this is the first step towards the long decline of giant galaxies, eventually this will become one of these giant elliptical galaxies.

Think of galaxies like m87, they are the result of all these giant galaxies. collisions that have swallowed up all the smaller dwarf galaxies, the largest galaxies in their region, there's nothing left to eat and then they just settle down, form a giant ball of stars, and fade into redder and redder stars over time. Image that NASA chose to celebrate James Webb's first year of observations was this image called Roe ophiuchus and this is the roophiucus star forming region. It is located less than 400 light years from Earth and is the closest star growing region to Earth, so we have had the largest.

The best known is the one Hubble did in Comic and now we have the closest star formation region. It is a very small star-forming region. There is only one star that is about the size of the Sun or larger and that is the one that dominates the bottom left of this image and the rest are smaller, they will probably become red dwarfs over time thanks again to the infrared view that we can see through all that gas and dust and be able to see the star below and one of the things that I really love about the Lucas ceiling, like this, is a picture that you can take with a small telescope or, if you have a digital camera and a good tripod during the summer, when the Milky Way is overhead, you can take a picture and see this amazing region and right in theMilky Way is such a fantastic object, very famous, well we have seen all the pretty photographs, there are many more pretty photographs to come, but let's really talk about the science, so let's look at the scientific capacity that Webb was designed to fill and this is use their infrared instruments to look back to the beginning of the universe, the time when all the building blocks of the modern galaxies we see today were coming together and this is because the universe has been expanding over time and Light coming from different objects has been redshifted and therefore although it may have started in the ultraviolet or visible light spectrum during the billions and billions of years of expansion of the universe.

In the universe, light has become increasingly miserable and things that were in visible light 13 billion years ago are now in the infrared, so an infrared instrument is required to be able to see that far back in time. , at that great distance, the great The expectation was that James Webb would allow us to see the oldest galaxies ever seen, just as they looked. just a few hundred million years after the Big Bang and the Hubble Space Telescope had already pushed back our vision to, in some cases, about a billion years less than a billion years after the Big Bang, so it was hoped that James Webb with his increasing energy capacity could take that further and he did, and within a few Weeks of being online we saw paper after paper with people claiming to have seen the farthest galaxy, the earliest galaxy after the Big Bang, and we saw numbers that were 300 million years later.

The Big Bang 200 million years after the Big Bang, maybe before, but then we have a whole series of other articles that looked very closely at the research that was being done, so at this point the consensus is that you see galaxies . Between 300 and 400 million years after the Big Bang and the techniques have improved, so now you can expect that every two months we will see a slightly more distant galaxy and this is because Webb is doing these huge studies of galaxies distant. Galaxy with the Hubble Space Telescope, we have the Deep Field study where they looked at the seemingly empty place in the sky observed for hours and hours, days and days and they could see that it was actually filled with hundreds of thousands of galaxies that Webb is making.

Same thing, but Webb is much more powerful. Web doesn't have to take breaks. Webb is doing a study and he should find millions of galaxies in a very small place in the sky and some of them will be further away and sooner than anyone has ever seen and therefore we anticipate that in the next few years we will see this record breaking breaks up again and again, who knows where it will end up, but the more distant objects will probably be seen using gravitational lensing where you use that power of a close-up galaxy cluster to be able to observe some object that you couldn't reveal and, what is More importantly, with that gravitational lens you can see the chemistry of this distant galaxy, be able to see what it is made of, but what The most surprising thing was the size and scale of the galaxy that was being seen in some cases.

Webb was looking at galaxies that were as massive or more massive than the Milky Way, and the Milky Way has existed for the entire age of the universe; It took billions of years. years to gather all the dwarf galaxies and assemble this large mature spiral galaxy and yet the Web is seeing galaxies like the Milky Way in the early stages of the universe, so this is one of the first big controversies coming from James Webb that the first galaxies were too big too soon and that if galaxies really were as massive as we're seeing them, then some of the underlying assumptions in cosmology, some of the models of how the Universe formed were incorrect, but astronomers have We've had time to look back through the models to look at the observations, and while they're exciting, they don't necessarily break the widely recognized models of how the universe formed, the ratios of dark matter and dark energy, how these smaller dwarf galaxies They joined together to form larger structures, one of the most interesting studies that jwst is doing is called the Jades study, this is the jwst advanced deep extragalactic survey and this is this web version of the Hubble deep field while observing this region and Many hours have been allocated to the web over the course of that first year of observing.

Many more hours are planned for the next cycle, which we will see later in the episode, but Webb is already seeing 10 times as many galaxies in the same region of the space with 15 times more detail than the Hubble Space Telescope. I saw one of the most important tools astronomers use to understand the chemistry of stars, it's called spectroscopy. This is where they take the light from a distant object, a star, a planet, whatever, they split it into a rainbow and then they look for very specific lines along this rainbow called absorption lines and those absorption lines tell you.

They say the chemistry of what is in that star, what is in that galaxy and one of the most surprising findings is that Webb detected the presence of organic molecules seen early in another example in which astronomers had had to use gravitational lenses to be able to see it, but they detected what are called polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons and this is a byproduct of combustion. If you have a chimney, you know that the soot in your chimney is the same thing and they are finding it in a galaxy that is billions of light years away in the early stages of the universe and of course this is really exciting because The sooner we see organic molecules in the universe, these are the building blocks of life and could help explain how complex organisms like the ones we have here on Earth could have formed in the universe, not only do we see the most distant galaxies, but we also see the more distant Quasar.

Of course, it is a supermassive black hole that is actively feeding on so much matter that it can eclipse the rest of the galaxy. The most active time in the universe is known as cosmic noon and this occurs a couple of billion years after the Big Bang, when the star-forming regions in these galaxies were actively forming new stars, planets and supermassive black holes. In the hearts of these galaxies they were extracting energy. in material from the galaxy around it and shining these bright quasar lights out into the universe, but once again it looks like the universe was able to get into this activity much sooner than anyone expected, which is why we saw this quasar called Sears 1019 It only contains about 9 million times the mass of the Sun, that is, twice the mass of the supermassive black hole at the heart of the Milky Way, but we are seeing it only 570 million years after the Big Bang and Jacob saw other supermassive black holes. a few hundred million years later, but some of which had already gained a billion times the mass of the Sun or more, so again, how did these black holes gather so much material so quickly in the universe when you move away from the universe? the cosmic web, this is the large scale structure of the universe where you have galaxies.

Clusters of galaxies that come together in these giant structures. Astronomers describe these walls and filaments with large voids in the middle as the mutual gravity of all these galaxies coming together and opening up. These giant spaces between them and once again with James Webb we go back to the earliest moments of the universe and see the beginning stages of this large-scale structure beginning to form. In this case it's just a handful of galaxies, but there is one massive galaxy that acts as an anchor and is using its gravity to pull other smaller galaxies into a long, thin filament of galaxies that measures about three million light years long and this is seen only 830 million years after the Big Bang.

James Webb's great job is to observe both recently formed planets and more mature planets around other stars and this is possible thanks to the telescope's infrared capabilities that allow him to see through the gas and dust of a star-forming region. Being able to see planets as they form around newly formed stars allows you to measure the chemicals in a planet's atmosphere separate from the chemicals in the spinning star to make this Point Jeans astronomical network to a star where we know the planet is going to pass directly in front of the star from our perspective, so it takes images of the star itself and then, as the planet passes in front of it, you get the presence of the world's atmosphere and from which astronomers were able to determine the footprint chemistry of that atmosphere an image of wasp 39b is located about 700 light years away and is a hot pattern it is definitely not a habitable world and yet Webb was able to capture a clear and unambiguous signal of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere of the planet this is the first time that carbon dioxide has been seen on another planet water vapor potassium sodium carbon monoxide other chemicals were also detected in the atmosphere of this planet in many cases the first time that these chemicals had been seen on the The atmosphere of another planet and the most exciting worlds we are all waiting to see are the trappist-1 system.

Trappist-1 is a red star that is orbited by seven Earth-sized worlds, several of which are in the habitable zone around this star. and if there is any place we know of that may have life, it will probably be Webb who is going around these worlds one by one examining their atmospheres or lack thereof and so far we have only looked at two planets during this first year. We got Trappist-1b, which is something like a super Mercury and, as expected, there was no atmosphere, but the second world, Traps 1C, is one that astronomers were quite excited about and hope may be like a super Venus, unfortunately not again. atmosphere, so we have two airless rocky worlds orbiting, but there are still five more to go.

Those in the habitable zone will be next, so stay tuned this year as we discover the exciting conclusion to what's happening with the Trappist. 1 system in the world of exoplanets we often don't get images, we get like the Specter data, we find out what the chemistry of the planet is, we can know what its orbital period is, the radius of the planet, the mass of the planet, but we don't know You get an image, but if the conditions are right and you have the right telescope, then you can take a direct image of an exoplanet. This has been done many times from Earth, but Webb was able to take his first direct image of an exoplanet, the planet again is not like Earth, it is nine times the mass of Jupiter and orbits a type a star which is a hot star. very young that is much more massive than the sun.

It takes 630 years to orbit the orbit. star at 92 Au, which is well beyond Pluto's orbit, but because the star is so bright and gives us so much light, the planet is so large and also far enough away that Webb can distinguish between the star and its planet. To give this image, here is an image of an exoplanet taken by the web. Webb was also able to confirm that an exoplanet finding planets is a process, so some telescope will detect a candidate planet and they will notice a dimming of a star as the planet might have passed by, but then astronomers have to make follow-up observations to tell. that yes, there is indeed a planet there, so there was a candidate plan that was found by NASA's transiting exoplanet survey satellite Tess and follow-up observations were made with James Webb to confirm that yes, there is indeed a planet here, he was able to use his near-infrared spectrograph and confirmed that the planet is there by observing two transits as it passes in front of the star.

We don't know much, the planet is Earth. in size, but we don't know if it has an atmosphere, so it could be another goal in the future for the web to come back and try to characterize this atmosphere and not just the planets. Webb has been observing brown dwarfs and these are considered giant failed stars. Jupiter somewhere between a red star or any giant planet and because these planets are cold, they are the perfect object to be observed by Webb with his infrared instrument to detect heat coming from the world, so Webb observed a triple system brown dwarf and in one of them, Webb was able to detect the presence of silicate in the atmosphere.

They can also see methane, carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, sodium, potassium, and even water vapor. We've seen many of these chemicals before, but the network is so powerful that you get this unmistakable signal of the presence of these chemicals in the atmosphere of this star. Many of the planets found so far are known as hot Jupiters. These are stars several times the mass of Jupiter that orbit incredibly close to their star. We know about them. Because they are relatively easy to find, they have a large gravitational influence on their star,They can also pass in front of the star and block a lot of light, so many of these have been found, we don't know how common they are.

They are, but it is like the low hanging fruit of exoplanetary research, but thanks to Webb we can study how these planets behave when they revolve around their stars, which is why one of the most famous is called wasp 18b and we have known it since 2009 only. it takes 23 hours to orbit its star this is a classic hot Jupiter it has 10 times the mass of Jupiter thanks to Webb astronomers were able to make a temperature map of the planet's atmosphere to see where it is hot and relatively colder and they were able learn that the planet is tidally locked to its star so it only shows one face to the star and one face is very far away so the side facing the star is incredibly hot and the side facing away It's still incredibly hot, but less hot.

The day side is a thousand degrees hotter than the night side and one of the big questions astronomers had was how well these planets can regulate their temperature, whether the cold side will be able to redistribute heat from the hot side in the case of the wasp 18b the answer is no, the heat is not well distributed from the day side to the night side James Webb has also spent some of his time looking at targets that are close to home, look at it here within the solar system and at this point Webb has observed all the planets you can within the solar system, you've looked at Mars, you've looked at Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, you can't look at Earth, Venus, Mercury or the Moon because you use this.

Giant sunshade to keep his instruments protected from the heat of the sun and the glare of the Earth and Moon, so Webb has observed all the planets he can in this first year of observations, so let's review the worlds first. We have Mars and this is an image of Mars seen in infrared thanks to James Webb we have two different wavelengths of radiation here 2.1 microns and 4.3 microns and the interesting thing about Mars is that it absorbs a lot of heat from the Sun. and then it It radiates again at night and different types of rocks emit different types of radiation, so under Webb's vision you can see different types of rocks on the surface of Mars.

This is challenging because Mars is relatively bright most of the time. There is a very limited limit to what the web can see and try to resolve any features, so astronomers had to take extremely short exposures of Mars and then create an image by adding all that data together. Then we have Jupiter and this image came out just a couple of days after the The full release of images and data came from jwste when it first went live in July, we got hints of the raw image and then along came the creators of Astro images like Judy Schmidt and cleaned up the image and got some just incredible images of the planet Jupiter that you could see. the atmospheric bands throughout the planet you can see the Great Red Spot you can see the haze over the north and south poles of Jupiter in the case of infrared the bright colors are the places where the warmest temperatures and the highest altitudes and therefore That when you look, you can see that the Great Red Spot is one of the brightest infrared objects on Jupiter's surface.

Next up is Saturn and this image came out a couple of weeks ago. When we recorded this episode, Saturn's atmosphere contains molecules. They absorb infrared radiation and that's why it looks very dark and cloudy in this infrared view, but the rings are quite reflective and quite bright seen in the infrared and then you can also see a bunch of moons orbiting Saturn. Then we have Uranus in the case of Uranus. We can see its rings from the front and the rings of Uranus are very different from the rings of Saturn unlike the rings of Saturn which are made of ice the rings of Uranus are made of dust and with these observations astronomers can work The rings are made from larger pieces measuring up to about 20 meters wide.

You can also see several of Uranus's moons in this image. We really need to get back to Uranus. It's time to get new images of this planet up close. The last planet in this tour is Neptune and once again Neptune's rings are quite dusty so they look great in the jwst image and we haven't seen these rings since Voyager made its flyby in 1989. You can see features in the upper atmosphere of Neptune, you can see these storms and bands all over the planet, you can see a lot of moons floating around the rings around Neptune and then you see Triton, which is a really bright star next to the planet. that has with the Hubble Space Telescope we can expect to see images of each of the planets that Webb can see each year and that will allow astronomers to track changes in the surface of these planets. let's see how storms grow let's see the effects of different seasons how the nature of the atmosphere on these planets changes over time we will understand much better how these planets change from year to year, but not just the planets, we got some images of some moons and In this image you're looking at Enceladus, which is this icy moon of Saturn known for the geysers that are spraying water ice into space.

We have only seen images of the geysers from the Cassini spacecraft that was orbiting Saturn and its moons, but Webb is powerful enough to detect the presence of these geysers from this enormous distance, astronomers measure the size of these columns and They

discovered

that they extend about 10,000 kilometers into space and can say that they are spewing about 300 liters per second of water into space which is enough to fill an Olympic swimming pool in a couple of hours. The hope was that Webb would be able to see some of the other molecules that were detected by Cassini, the presence of hydrogen gas in the plumes or various organic molecules, etc.

Unfortunately, with this set of observations, Webb couldn't see it, but we'll see over time, with more observations year after year, those more sensitive signals may start to emerge from this data. We got images of Titan taken by James. Webb Space Telescope Titan is the largest moon of Saturn and a moon with a very thick atmosphere where it rains methane there are lakes of methane on the surface mountains made of ice and Titan appears to have organic molecules on its surface even though the Cassini spacecraft was on Saturn does not have the same type of optics, the same infrared capabilities that the James Webb Space Telescope has, so these images coming from James Webb can see through the haze that surrounds Titan and reveal some of the structures of the surface that can be seen in the northern region.

It's called Kraken Mare and with continued observations from Jane's website we will have a much better idea of ​​the geological features of Titan's surface and this is perfect because NASA will be sending a nuclear powered helicopter to the surface of Titan in the next Now in the decade we will know where to look, so when asteroids pass in front of the stars, you have the perfect opportunity to learn more about the asteroid itself and in this case, James was able to participate in an occultation of the asteroid called charlico and astronomers they know. This asteroid has rings when the asteroid passed in front of the star.

Webb was able to make really precise measurements of the rings to observe the brightness drops as each of the rings passed in front of the star and of course last year we had Mission Dart, the double asteroid redirection test where a spaceship crashed into a dimorphic asteroid, which is a moon of didymus. Astronomers around the world turned space telescopes to observe the aftermath of this epic collision and Webb was able to see this expanding cloud of debris coming from the asteroid. dimorph of this surprising impact and then astronomers were able to measure exactly how much change in the orbital velocity of dimorph around the larger asteroid.

It has been an incredible year of scientific observations, but Webb was not without its problems and the first big problem was that the Space Telescope was hit by micrometeorites and there were expected to be small pieces of dust in the solar system that were expected to hit the mirror and began to slowly degrade the telescope's optical capability, but in May a fairly considerable amount of dust crashed into the telescope causing a notable amount of damage. Still, the capabilities of the telescope are well, beyond the expectations of the astronomers who are dedicated to this, but they are able to detect this damage and, in fact, based on this damage, the people who work. with James Webb decided to change the way the telescope makes its orbit so that before rotating in all the directions that it was able to see it could look at any target it was directed at, but based on this they decided that they were going to try to make the Most of your observations are downstream, behind the telescope as it rotates in orbit, so before, if you rotate upstream, you get the additional velocity of the telescope and the piece of dust hitting it, so now only in this case. the pieces of dust that reach an orbit will collide with it, hitting it with less speed and causing less damage to the optical wheels.

I had a problem with Webb's Miri instrument. The Miri mid-infrared instrument now has four observation modes. and one is called medium resolution spectroscopy mode, so the engineers detected that there was excessive friction coming from this mode of this instrument, so they turned off this instrument so they could use the rest of their modes and then they were able to diagnose the problem and put it back online and so, for a couple of weeks, astronomers were able to use that mode of the Miri instrument. There was also a problem with the near-infrared imager and the slitless spectrograph, and this was not a problem for the instrument itself. but they were having a communications delay problem when sending data to and from the instrument.

This object is important because astronomers use it to study, say, the atmospheres of exoplanets to understand the chemicals in distant galaxies, so they had to take this instrument offline to debug the problem with the communication delay and then turn it back on. put it online, but at the moment we are recording, all parts of the web work perfectly, but this is natural. All missions have various problems that arise and scientists can work with the instruments and try to repair them. try to get your various modes back online, debug the software, install patches and updates and keep the telescope running, but there is nowhere on the web you need to worry about right now, the telescope is performing above and beyond original expectations, is producing amazing science that astronomers can be proud of, and hopefully, if all goes well, we will be able to learn more and more about the universe thanks to the web for decades to come.

So what's next? This concludes a year of observations by James Webb and as you can see it has been a very busy year and this is just a fraction of all the observations that Webb made many times at the telescope. It was awarded to individual astronomers who were writing their research papers, but they have a one-year embargo on their data, but then that. The data is released to the public, so anyone can review this older data, make discoveries, and write their own articles based on what they found. That first year there was a lot of embargo data.

You will see the continuous discoveries made. over the web and then you'll also see scientists get their hands on all that data that was collected in the first year, so we'll see a lot more science coming to light next year and beyond. Torn by how the data release system works, on the one hand, we have this year embargoing information for astronomers so that if they have requested time at the telescope, they can take the time to do a proper study of the data. be able to publish your results in a peer-reviewed journal have other astronomers see them be able to publish them be able to take your time and do good science but at the same time other people can't work with that data and maybe they can make other discoveries too, but if they just you want to publish it for everyone, then it's a race and it may be that the person who does their first paper is the one who gets the most publicity and it's not necessarily the best science that we saw. a little bit of that, with these discoveries of the first galaxies, you saw person after person saying: I have seen the farthest galaxy, no, I have seen the farthest galaxy.

It took time for astronomers to sit down and study the data and figure out what it is. signals from more distant galaxies, so I wonder if this embargo process helps do good science or slows down the science that could be done. Let me know what you think all the observations that were made last year were part of cycle one. all priorities set by Space Telescope SciencesThey are also the people who manage the day-to-day operations of Web and Hubble. They have the master schedule of where Webb is looking and what hours we had just a couple of weeks ago. the announcement of the second cycle, these are all the observations that the website will make for its second year of operations and once again, there are many really interesting objectives that the website will be analyzing and over the course of next year we will be able to report on what has been found, so there goes a year of James Webb's observations.

Everything interesting we saw in this first year, but the telescope is working very well and was launched with a very precise orbit it seems. as if it would make it last much longer than astronomers expected. It was originally expected that the telescope could operate for at least 10 years and now, based on how well its orbital insertion went, it looks like the telescope will last much longer than astronomers expected. It will be around for more than 20 years, maybe 25 years, so I hope to have the opportunity to do this 25 more times at least as we learn more and more about the universe.

Now, of course, this is just the tip of the iceberg of all the work. that we have done on the James Webb Space Telescope. I write a newsletter each week where I give you a high-level overview of all the interesting stories that have emerged across space astronomy this week. We cover all of these stories in spatial snippets every week here. on the channel so you can learn a little more and see some interesting photos, we write full articles on the Universe Today website about each of the stories and I do interviews with many of the scientists who have made the discoveries we have.

We're talking here today, so we'll have links to the show notes for many of the interviews that accompanied this episode. The people behind some of the discoveries made with James Webb. I enjoyed this very long bonus special episode that talks about

everything

. the great discoveries made by James Webb and we couldn't do this without our sponsors another special thanks to Joel Yancey Antonio lofilara Dustin cable solo Paul Davis Vlad chiplin Jay Dennis David Gilton matzo George Jeremy Mattern Jordan young Tim Whalen Dave veriboff Andrew Gross and Josh Schultz, those who support us at the master of the universe level, you can join our amazing Club, visit patreon.com Universetoday, it's hard for me to choose which one is my favorite of the year.

I think it's actually the last picture in the row of bladderwrack clusters. because I'm very familiar with that object, so seeing the image coming from James Webb was really exciting for me, but I'd love to know what your favorite photo or story was this year, just put a note in the comments, let me know. What was your favorite research conducted by James Webb in that first year?