Astronomers on NASA's James Webb telescope images: 'Like a kid in a candy store'

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Astronomers around the world have been gripped by the first images from NASA's James Webb Space Telescope, the new $10 billion observatory designed to peer further into the universe's past than ever before.

The first image, similar to the now-famous "Hubble Deep Field" that showed off an unparalleled view of galaxies in the 1990s, was released during an event hosted by President Biden on Monday. In it, thousands of galaxies are seen crowding a tiny portion of our night sky – some so distant that distortion caused by other objects' gravity, known as "gravitational lensing," warps their shapes.

And on Tuesday, NASA released even more images: a vibrant, colorful capture of the Carina Nebula; a smattering of five galaxies known as Stephan's Quintet; two comparison images of the Southern Ring Nebula; and data on the atmospheric composition of a far-off planet that shows signs of water, clouds, and haze.

"Me and every other astronomer – we're kids in a candy store," said Eric Perlman, an observational astrophysicist at Florida Tech. "And the amazing thing is this is the candy store that keeps on giving. The candy store is our universe."

Perlman said Webb's predecessor, the Hubble Space Telescope launched in 1990, is easily surpassed by NASA's newest addition.

"Each one of these images, every one of them, blows Hubble away. It's much, much deeper and there's more detail," Perlman said. "And it's also in a completely new band because it's in the infrared. There's just an amazing amount of new stuff to see."

Tuesday's release of the Carina Nebula image, Perlman said, was particularly powerful. It shows a region of space similar to where our sun was born.

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"If we want to know where the sun was born and in what kind of region, now all we have to do is look at that image," Perlman said. "Each one of the stars in it is a star like the sun that is forming. And many of them have solar systems that are forming, the gas that's forming the stars, the gas that gets blown out of the stars when they form. It's just so much detail."

To general audiences or members of the public, images from the $10 billion telescope that will need an additional $1 billion a year to operate are, at least on the surface, familiar. But Hubble's later images were collected after decades of expertise – that these first slate of results from Webb are exponentially more detailed and take less time to capture are significant strides. And they likely mean even more impressive results moving forward.

"Hubble's discoveries got better and better and better every year," Perlman said. "We've gotten spoiled. We've gotten 30 years now with Hubble. Well, Webb is just going to get better and better and better. Every year, every discovery is going to be better than the last."

Moving forward, astronomers like Perlman will be able to get "time" with the telescope located a million miles from Earth. That process begins with submitting proposals that, if approved, allow researchers and astronomers to use Webb for exploring their corners of the universe.

"These are some of the first stars forming in the universe. So we're going back, literally, to the very first stars that were there at the beginning," he said.

"If you don't dream big and then carefully plan and build a huge multifaceted, multinational team that includes NASA, ESA, and industry, you don't get these rewards. This has been an amazing project with many thousands of people in many different countries, and we're all sharing in this new set of amazing discoveries."

Contact Emre Kelly at [email protected] or 321-242-3715. Follow him on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram at @EmreKelly.

This article originally appeared on Florida Today: Astronomers on NASA's James Webb images: 'Like a kid in a candy store'