The capture comes from the closest star-forming region to Earth, 390 light-years away, located in the Rho Ophiuchi gas cloud.
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The image, which contains about 50 young stars similar in size to the Sun, “allows us to witness a very brief period of the stellar life cycle with new clarity,” said Klaus Pontoppidan, Webb project scientist, explaining that the Sun itself lived a phase like this “a long time ago”.
On July 12, 2022, the American space agency revealed the first color photos of the telescope, located 1,5 million kilometers from Earth, which marked the beginning of scientific operations of this technological jewel.
“In just one year, the James Webb Space Telescope transformed humanity's view of the cosmos, peering through clouds of poeire and seeing light from distant corners of the universe for the first time,” said NASA Director Bill Nelson.
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“Each new image is a new discovery that allows scientists around the world to ask and answer questions they never dreamed of before,” he added.
On its first anniversary, NASA plans a special to review all the discoveries during a live video broadcast over the Internet.
Infra-red
For a year now, the James Webb Telescope has been dazzling astronomers with never-before-seen high-precision images.
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To date, he has observed the most distant galaxy ever detected, as well as black holes, and measured for the first time the temperature of distant rocky planets – which resemble Earth –, whose atmospheres he began to analyze.
With observations that have generated a sea of scientific studies, the telescope's main missions are to explore the universe. As well as analyzing exoplanets, which are located outside the Solar System, which will help to understand more about the formation and life cycle of stars.
Among the spectacular images released so far, in October 2022 the emblematic “Pillars of Creation” showed humanity immense gas structures and poeIt will be full of stars being born 6.500 light years from Earth, still in our galaxy, the Milky Way.
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To travel the universe, the James Webb telescope cost US$10 billion (about R$48,9 billion at current prices) and decades of work. It is the successor to the Hubble Space Telescope, still in operation, but unlike its predecessor, which observes the universe mainly in the visible spectrum, the James Webb operates in the infrared.
This technology allows you to detect much dimmer lights and therefore see much further. As this wavelength is imperceptible to the human eye, the images are “translated” into visible colors.
The region captured in the image released this Wednesday is “completely desolate when seen with Hubble”, explained Klaus Pontoppidan on Twitter.
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Furthermore, the Webb telescope has enough fuel to operate for 20 years.
“We have selected an ambitious set of observations for the second year, based on everything we have learned so far,” said Jane Rigby of NASA's Goddard Space Center.
“James Webb’s scientific mission is just beginning,” he concluded.
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