Here it is, several thousand years in the making: the protostellar jet HH212 as seen in the infrared by #JWST.
We discovered this jet in 1993, glowing in the light of shocked molecular hydrogen at 2.12 microns, as gas emerges symmetrically at about 100 km/s from the two poles of a young protostar not far from the Horsehead Nebula in Orion.
Our new JWST image spans six wavelengths & is ten times sharper than any previous infrared image.
The first results from my #JWST time, in a project shared with Tom Ray et al. from the MIRI consortium, a study of the extremely young protostellar outflow, HH211, in Perseus, published in advance form in Nature today.
New data from JWST of Jupiter's moon Europa has identified the sub-surface ocean as the source of CO2 deposits in a region called Tara Regio.
Previous studies, including observations by the Galileo mission many years ago, had detected CO2 but could not rule out an asteroid origin for the CO2.
The 10x10 pixelated images show wavelengths measured by the NIRSpec instrument in 320 x 320 km cells covering Europa. The white pixels correspond to CO2.
I promise to do a deep dive into the #JWST Orion Nebula & Trapezium Cluster images & results we released today.
But I’ve been running ever since, fighting LaTeX problems to get the papers on arXiv tomorrow.
The one on the free-floating planetary-mass binaries or JuMBOs will be there. The big overview paper is proving harder as we struggle to convert from A&A formatting to arXiv.
The JWST team recently released this image of Saturn's moon Enceladus, showing water plumes extending out 10,000 km, 20 times the size of the moon itself, which creates a fuzzy torus of water particles around the orbit of Enceladus.
The inset shows a mosaic of Enceladus and its water jets, based on images taken by the Cassini orbiter in 2009.
Let's learn more about Enceladus and examine why the JWST image is so low-res and pixelated. https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2023/webb-maps-surprisingly-large-plume-jetting-from-saturn-s-moon-enceladus #Enceladus#JWST#Science
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HNY & welcome to 2024 everyone (well, except not yet the folk in Hawai’i 😉) 🌺
First media interview of the year done, on the BBC World Service Newsday about the first two years of the NASA/ESA/CSA #JWST 🚀🛰️🔭
I should be in a BBC TV piece by Becky Morelle later today, but there’s an article by Jonathan Amos already on their website, featuring our Orion Nebula & HH212 images as part of a lovely gallery 🙂👍
In this new #JWST NIRCam image of the supernova remnant Cassiopeia A (Cas A), we see the remains of a star that first imploded and then exploded about 340 years ago (from our point of view), leaving behind a tangle of gas, dust, and magnetic fields.
A #thread with some details of what we are seeing in the image.
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Thanks for all the lovely attention & comments on our NASA/ESA/CSA #JWST image of HH212 yesterday, & welcome to everyone newly following.
On this wet, windy Sunday afternoon, I thought I'd combine all four of our recently-released JWST Cycle 1 star formation images into one post & mini-thread.
Namely the short- & long-wavelength mosaics of the inner Orion Nebula & Trapezium Cluster, and the protostellar flows HH211 & HH212.
Researchers using the JWST recently detected the heavy element tellurium in the ejecta of two colliding neutron stars whose cataclysmic merger was detected in March this year by several observatories.
Neutron star mergers create gamma-ray bursts, gravitational waves and many elements with large atomic weights.
In the spectral data below, a distinct peak can be seen in the region of the spectrum associated with tellurium.
After 15 years, yesterday was my last at #ESTEC as an ESA staff member*, & as is my longstanding habit, it ended with me cycling home late at night 🌖🚴♂️
Well, I am an astronomer, after all 🔭🤷♂️🙂
It has been a privilege, & there is much & there are many I will miss 🙇♂️
But I’m not retiring: next, a move to Germany 🇳🇱➡️🇩🇪, science with #JWST, talks & tours, writing a book, & many Space Rocks events & projects in development 🖖🤘
Next in our 19 days of #PHANGS galaxies is the face-on spiral IC 5332, as seen by #Hubble and #JWST.
It is located about 30 million light-years (8.84 Mpc) away.
The name comes from the 1910 Second Index Catalogue of Nebulæ and Clusters of Stars (IC). This was from a time before astronomers distinguished between nebulas and galaxies. It was discovered by Lewis Swift in 1896 at the Lowe Observatory in California, who noted it was extremely faint.
The picture below is of the famous symmetric jet HH212, emerging from a protostar in the outskirts of Orion.
We discovered HH212 in 1993 & have studied it on & off ever since.
This false-colour image was taken in a single filter covering the 2.12 micron emission line of molecular hydrogen & took almost five hours on the ESO VLT about 20 years ago 🔭
Tomorrow, you’ll get to see how HH212 looks to #JWST 🛰️
The good? Yesterday’s #JWST observations of the Orion Trapezium Cluster were successful & we now have NIRSpec spectral data for lots of brown dwarfs, planetary-mass objects, & JuMBOs 🥳
The bad? The other half of the programme the day before didn’t work 😭
That included our highest-priority targets, the longest exposure times, & extra calibration observations 😬
The guide star acquisition failed – we’re not yet sure why 🤨
It definitely says something about me that I find it very exciting to know a version of IRAF that’ll run native on an M1/M2 MacBook Pro is being released by NOIRLab 😍
I’ll leave it to you to fill in exactly what it says about me, mind you 🤷♂️
(And yes, I know that Community IRAF 2.17 already exists for macOS – how do you think those #JWST images of Orion, HH211, & HH212 got made? 🤪)
From this morning’s inbox & this afternoon’s spam folder 🙄
Why is it that some people feel the necessity to foist their beliefs & ideologies on others like this, whether religious, political, colonial, or whatever?
I mean, that’s a rhetorical question – it pretty much leads to every piece of human ugliness on this planet.