Written by:

25 December 2022 is the date that marks exactly one year since the James Webb Space Telescope, or JWST, was sent into space. The JWST mission is an international collaboration between the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), the European Space Agency (ESA), and the Canadian Space Agency (CSA) which garners worldwide attention from the commencement.  Even so, JWST has only started its scientific work in July 2022. Since then, various processed images and data have been released for researchers all around the world to study the obscure aspects of celestial objects that could not be penetrated by previously existing optical technologies.

The purpose of JWST being launched into space is to complement the work of the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) which has been in service since 1990 and is already considered ageing and non-serviceable. Unlike HST which observes in the near ultraviolet, visible, and near-infrared with wavelengths of 0.1–2.5 μm, the wavelength for JWST is more focused on the infrared region with a range of 0.6–28.5 μm. Hence, the mission allows observing to be done in the molecular spectroscopic realm. Molecules such as CO, CO2, SO2, H2O and even PAH (García-Bernete et al., 2022) in the atmosphere of alien worlds outside the solar system are now easier to observe and study. Accordingly, researchers are now able to further investigate the atmospheric chemical content of exoplanets, the gases that form nebulae, the interstellar medium, and distant galaxy clusters.

For instance, a conference at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, US on 13 December 2022 recently revealed the atmospheric contents of the planets in the TRAPPIST-1 System, a cool red dwarf star that is located about 40.7 light years away (about 378 trillion kilometers) from Earth. As a comparison, the Sun has a surface temperature of 5800 K while TRAPPIST-1 is only 2550 K with a mass of 8.9% that of the Sun. In the conference, the researchers who examined the initial TRAPPIST-1 data from JWST found that planets TRAPPIST-1g and -1b do not have oxygen-rich atmospheres (Benneke et al., 2022; Lim et al., 2022; Witze, 2022). It gives a rough idea of the formation of the entire planetary system of the star TRAPPIST-1 and the likeability of the existence of extraterrestrial life in the system.

When NASA released the first five images and spectroscopic data to the public on 12 July 2022, it impressed many who witnessed the live presentation. Among the earliest images released is Stephan's Quintet, five galaxies seemingly dancing with each other. In fact, only four galaxies (NGC 7317, NGC 7318A, NGC 7318B, and NGC 7319) are trapped in an interaction with a supermassive black hole that is 24 times the mass of the Sun and is 290 million light-years away. The fifth galaxy that makes up the Quintet, NGC 7320, is only 40 million years from Earth. So, the galaxy becomes the foreground for the cosmic dance of the other four. This image is an example of how JWST provides further insight into the model of galaxy formation, evolution, and interaction with supermassive black holes.

Meanwhile, the age of the Universe is measured since the Big Bang event and is also named cosmic time or cosmic age. It can also be represented in a redshift function, z. The higher the value of z, the further into the past we observe. On a cosmological scale, the JWST mission is estimated to have the ability to allow us to penetrate further into the z ~ 20, which is equivalent to less than 200 million years in the age of the Universe. In that phase, the Universe began to become transparent from its dark age and light can move freely across the Universe which consequently falls into the telescope to be observed and studied. In comparison, it is estimated that the first galaxies or protogalaxies formation happened more than 100 million years after the Big Bang, which corresponds to z ~ 30 while the CMB (the first cold remnant of freely moving light throughout the Universe) was originally emitted around 380,000 years after the Big Bang, i.e., at z ~1100. A recent publication by Atek et al. (2022) who examined data from the galaxy cluster SMACS0723 (one of the images launched in July 2022) outlined galaxy candidates with a value of z ~ 16 which means that they were formed only 250 million years after the Big Bang.

Due to the capability of the mission, various JWST-themed conferences and presentations have been held since last year. As this article was written, experts were sharing new research from the JWST mission at the 241st meeting of the American Astronomical Society (AAS), in Seattle, USA. A wide range of topics ranging from galaxies in the early universe to planets outside our solar system are discussed including early findings of “early pea,” a rare class of small galaxies with intense star formation found in JWST images that are expected to exist when the Universe is about 690 million years (Rhoads et al., 2023). In February 2023, the International Astronomical Union Symposium 377 is to be held in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, which is the first IAU Conference in Southeast Asia since 1990. Themed "Early Disk-Galaxy Formation: From JWST to the Milky Way", this symposium covers the role of JWST in stellar population evolution, Galactic archaeology, and cosmology, and invites international experts to share research findings on the topic.

In this prospect, the further observation and exposure of JWST into the darkness of deep space set up bountiful potentials for astronomers to gradually uncover the mysteries of distant objects. Simultaneously, it endeavours to unravel the ultimate question of cosmogony scientifically—instead of theologically or philosophically—whether this Universe emerges from the singularity or from nothingness. 

References:

1.     Atek, H., Shuntov, M., Furtak, L. J., Richard, J., Kneib, J.-P., Mahler, G., Zitrin, A., McCracken, H. J., Charlot, S., Chevallard, J., & Chemerynska, I. (2022). Revealing galaxy candidates out to z ∼ 16 with JWST observations of the Lensing Cluster SMACS0723. Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 519(1), 1201–1220. https://doi.org/10.1093/mnras/stac3144

2.     Benneke, B., Piaulet, C., Roy, P.-A., Lim, O., Doyon, R., Coulombe, L.-P., Turbet, M., Espinoza, N., Gao, P., Cowan, N., Fauchez, T., Kaltenegger, L., Artigau, E., Radica, M., Lafreniere, D., Allart, R., Cadieux, C., Taylor, J., Albert, L., … L'Heureux, A. (2022.). First Science Results from JWST. In Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI). Baltimore. Retrieved from https://www.stsci.edu/contents/events/stsci/2022/december/first-science-results-from-jwst.

3.     Lim, O., Doyon., Benneke, B., Artigau, E., Coulombe, L.-P., Radica, M., Albert, L., Piaulet, C., Roy, P.-A., Salhi, S., Lafrenière, D., Cowan, D., Rowe, J., Espinoza, N., Taylor, J., Darveau-Bernier, A. (2022). First Science Results from JWST. In Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI). Baltimore. Retrieved from https://www.stsci.edu/contents/events/stsci/2022/december/first-science-results-from-jwst.

4.     García-Bernete, I., Rigopoulou, D., Alonso-Herrero, A., Donnan, F. R., Roche, P. F., Pereira-Santaella, M., Labiano, A., Peralta de Arriba, L., Izumi, T., Ramos Almeida, C., Shimizu, T., Hönig, S., García-Burillo, S., Rosario, D. J., Ward, M. J., Bellocchi, E., Hicks, E. K., Fuller, L., & Packham, C. (2022). A high angular resolution view of the PAH emission in Seyfert galaxies using JWST/Mrs Data. Astronomy & Astrophysics, 666. https://doi.org/10.1051/0004-6361/202244806

5.     Rhoads, J. E., Wold, I. G., Harish, S., Kim, K. J., Pharo, J., Malhotra, S., Gabrielpillai, A., Jiang, T., & Yang, H. (2023). Finding peas in the early universe with JWST. The Astrophysical Journal Letters, 942(1). https://doi.org/10.3847/2041-8213/acaaaf

6.   Witze, A. (2022). JWST gets first glimpse of 7-planet system with potentially habitable worlds. Nature. https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-022-04452-3