NASA Webb Telescope

A brain-new image from Webb! 🧠 What looks like a brain is actually a dying star blowing off a shell of gas, and within that shell, a cloud of various gases. The dark lane that divides its “hemispheres” may be related to an outflow from the central star. science.nasa.gov/missions/webb/…

Spring into spring with this new image of the Cat's Paw Nebula from NASA's Chandra and @NASAWebb. We expect it to start knocking planets off the counter for sport any minute now. 🐾

Let’s get to the heart of it. 🧡 This new image from Hubble and @NASAWebb takes a closer look at the core of Messier 101, also known as the Pinwheel Galaxy. At 25 million light-years away, M101 is one of the closest “face-on” spiral galaxies to us: go.nasa.gov/4lydce2

Now on display at Air and Space: 🌌 James Webb Space Telescope Pathfinder, a full-scale engineering model used by @nasawebb for critical testing in development of the spacecraft ☀️ Parker Solar Probe full-scale model built primarily out of spare parts and back-ups from the spacecraft that has flown through the Sun’s corona

#NASAWebb has revolutionized our ability to study the formation and growth of new planetary systems, some with similarities to our own. On March 18, join us for a conversation on what we’ve learned about young planetary systems. youtube.com/live/Sz_i_4_fG…

Webb may showcase the beauty of deep space objects, but it also plays a strong role in planetary defense applications. Using Webb observations, experts accurately measured the size and orbit of asteroid 2024 YR4 and confirmed it will not impact our Moon in 2032. go.nasa.gov/3ORMC3c

Why does dark matter matter? Scientists think dark matter started clumping together first in the early universe, eventually pulling regular matter together, prompting galaxy and star formation to begin earlier than they might have otherwise.

We can’t see dark matter. It doesn’t emit, reflect, absorb, or block light, but like everything with mass, it has gravity. If we observe how and where light is being warped by gravity, we can make a map of the matter warping it, even if that matter is invisible to us.

If it’s invisible, how do you map it and why does it *matter*? Using Webb data, researchers mapped locations of dark matter (shown in blue) across a field of nearly 800,000 galaxies. nasa.gov/missions/webb/…

What’s next for this star will depend on its mass, which is yet undetermined. If it is a high mass star it will explode in a supernova. If it’s less massive and more Sun-like, it’ll keep shedding layers until only its core remains as a dense white dwarf star.

Webb has captured two views of this nebula. The near-infrared view shows more stars, as well as background galaxies. In the mid-infrared, the cosmic dust glows more prominently.

A brain-new image from Webb! 🧠 What looks like a brain is actually a dying star blowing off a shell of gas, and within that shell, a cloud of various gases. The dark lane that divides its “hemispheres” may be related to an outflow from the central star. science.nasa.gov/missions/webb/…

Perhaps the most massive & old stars are also the dustiest, and the dust could make them look less luminous and hard to see. This particular dusty supergiant seems to support that hypothesis. Next? Locate and study similar stars that have the potential to go supernova, but haven’t yet.

@NASAHubble We would expect that the most massive stars (those that will end their lives as supernovas) to be among the brightest and most luminous, and thus easy to spot in pre-supernova imagery. But that hasn’t been the case.

What if you could go back in time and see a star just before it goes supernova? Archives of telescope data are essentially letting astronomers do just that. 🧵 👇 science.nasa.gov/missions/webb/…

This image was not captured with Webb’s primary high-resolution camera (NIRCam) but rather, is the result of data from our spectrograph (NIRSpec). A spectrograph breaks light into components and gives scientists data about things like the chemical composition and/or motion of what is being observed. This data is usually represented by graphs, rather than images, but our NIRSpec has a special mode that can also capture spatial data. This allows scientists to build a map of their observations. For example here, being able to build a map of the planet via the locations of the atmospheric data, which also gives us the movement of the auroras through the planet’s atmosphere.

@NASAWebb What a shitty ass camera

Hey, hey, it’s everyone’s favorite 7th planet from the Sun! Webb has provided us with the first vertical view of Uranus’s ionosphere, revealing auroras shaped by its tilted magnetic field. esawebb.org/news/weic2602/

This image was not captured with Webb’s primary high-resolution camera (NIRCam) but rather, is the result of data from our spectrograph (NIRSpec). A spectrograph breaks light into components and gives scientists data about things like the chemical composition and/or motion of what is being observed. This data is usually represented by graphs, rather than images, but our NIRSpec has a special mode that can also capture spatial data. This allows scientists to build a map of their observations. For example here, being able to build a map of the planet via the locations of the atmospheric data, which also gives us the movement of the auroras through the planet’s atmosphere.

@NASAWebb This is the worst picture by JWST I've seen. No details at all. Or did they purposely defocus it.

@JoeCal422 @grok The link in the post explains this in more detail.

@NASAWebb @grok can you explain this in more detail what we're looking at