Thread by @newscientist

NASA’s #JamesWebbSpaceTelescope has released its first full-resolution images in a preview of the science soon to come

This is one of the brightest nebulas in the sky. About 7,600 light-years away, the Carina Nebula is a huge cloud of gas and young stars

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These five galaxies, called Stephan’s Quintet, are about 290 million light-years away

Four of the five are engaged in a deadly game of chicken, swooping past one another closer and closer until, one day in the cosmic future, they will most likely smash together and merge

This cloud of dust and gas surrounding a dying star is called the Southern Ring, or the Eight-Burst Nebula

It’s about 2000 light-years away and nearly half a light-year across. The bright cloud that makes up the ring came from the outer layers of one of the stars at the centre

This image showcases one of JWST’s other key capabilities: examining the light shining through the atmosphere of an exoplanet

It is the spectrum of light coming from a planet called WASP-96b, a gas giant about 1150 light-years from Earth

These four images, showing two sparkling nebulas, a group of doomed galaxies and the chemical composition of a giant exoplanet, are the culmination of decades of work by scientists and engineers – and they’re just the beginning

Yesterday, @NASAWebb also released a stunning image called “Webb’s First Deep Field, containing thousands of galaxies from the cosmic dawn

After its December 2021, launch, JWST beamed down its very first images in February, but those images were part of the telescope testing process, not science images, and they did not yet demonstrate #JWST’s full power

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Now that we have the first full-resolution images from JWST, the next step is getting more detailed data from even deeper observations of the cosmos so that researchers can start digging into the science

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“This day gives a new meaning to ‘as far as the eye can see’,” said US Congressman Steny Hoyer during the image release event at @NASAGoddard

newscientist.com/article/232825…