The James Webb Space Telescope, which has been in orbit since the middle of the year to study the limits of the universe and the atmosphere of distant planets, provided exceptional images in 2022. His work to date is just a blueprint of what he can do in the not too distant future.

The results of the Webb telescope, located 1.5 million kilometers from Earth, are in many ways superior to those of the veteran Hubble telescope, which continues to work but does not have the same accuracy as the lenses of its young competitor.

With a successful launch, Webb is expected to operate for at least 20 years instead of the original 10 years.

“It’s behaving a lot better than we expected,” Massimo Stiavelli, head of mission for the Space Telescope Science Institute, who pilots the 6.5-ton spacecraft, told AFP.

“Instruments have become more efficient, lenses have become more precise and stable,” he explains. This stability is the key to clear images.

The images coming from the Webb are initially invisible to the human eye because, unlike Hubble, it operates primarily in the infrared spectrum.

However, thanks to his spectacular coloring in the photographs, he managed to dazzle fans.

With this frequency of infrared waves, James Webb can detect the faintest traces of light in the universe. That is, the determination of the dawn of one’s birth without the influence of stellar nebulae, or the analysis by a spectrograph of the atmosphere of exoplanets, planets outside the solar system.

– 18 petals –

The launch of James Webb aboard an Ariane 5 rocket in late 2021 crowned an odyssey that NASA began over 30 years ago.

After several failures, an investment of ten billion dollars, and the contribution of ten thousand people, the telescope was perfectly placed into orbit, especially with the installation of an umbrella the size of a tennis court.

Its main mirror, 6.5 meters in diameter, consists of 18 petals that have been gradually opened and calibrated to achieve unprecedented accuracy with an error of just one millionth of a meter.

On July 12, 2022, Webb sent five images that highlighted its capabilities: thousands of galaxies, some of which formed shortly after the Big Bang, up to 13.8 billion years ago.

A few months later, he photographed Jupiter in great detail, which will help to understand the inner workings of this huge gas planet.

– “Excess” of galaxies –

Other colorful images that raised eyebrows were the “Pillars of Creation,” huge formations of gas and dust full of stars, in shades of blue, red, and gray.

The images and data invite scientists to “rethink their models of star formation,” NASA explained.

Just five months after launch, the telescope gave astronomers a glimpse of a galaxy that formed 350 million years after the Big Bang.

These galactic formations are much brighter than previously thought and may have formed much earlier than previously thought.

“We have an “excess” of galaxies in the distant Universe compared to theoretical models,” David Elbaz, scientific director of the astrophysics department of the Commissariat of Atomic Energy and Alternative Energies (CEA) of France, told AFP.

Where Hubble saw only “irregular galaxies”, James Webb’s precision “turned them into magnificent galactic spirals” similar in shape to ours.

A kind of “universal pattern” that could help unravel the formation of stars.

As for exoplanets, the first confirmation of the presence of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere of Wasp 39-b was obtained, the clouds of which could produce photochemical phenomena.

According to Massimo Stiavelli, these first sightings point to “big surprises” in the near future.