 Hello. And welcome to our first half of 2022 review, focusing on the James Webb Space Telescope's first large release. It's been a long wait, but I think you'll find it worth the wait. In an early test, the release included some stars in the Large Magellanic Cloud. We'll take a look at that. And also, whenever I have a Hubble image of the same thing that James Webb photographed, I'll bring in the Hubble image and we can see the change. We had one of those for the Large Magellanic Cloud and several of the other objects. Next, we'll cover the cosmic cliffs in the Corine and Ebula, followed by the beautiful southern ring planetary nebula. Then we'll get a focus on three different galaxies, a classic spiral galaxy, a barred spiral galaxy, where we'll look deeper into the bar, what is going on there, and a ring galaxy, the Cartwheel Ring Galaxy. Then we'll take a deep look into one of the galaxies in the Stefan's Quintet. We'll actually look at and examine the black hole and the material around the black hole, and the material flowing away from the black hole to the point where Webb can actually determine what that material is made of. Then we'll do a deep dive into Webb's first deep field image of thousands upon thousands of galaxies. We'll look at warped galaxies and determine whether they're the same. We'll dive into some of the oldest galaxies that have ever been photographed, galaxies that Hubble couldn't see. One is 13.1 billion light years away, and we'll find out what that is made of. So we'll get started with the Large Magellanic Cloud. I trust you'll find it interesting and informative. Thanks for watching. Here's a Spitzer infrared space telescope image of some stars in the Large Magellanic Cloud dwarf galaxy orbiting the Milky Way. Now we're morphing this into the image taken by Webb's mid-infrared instrument. A retired Spitzer telescope was one of NASA's great observatories, and the first to provide high-resolution images of the near and mid-infrared universe. As you can see, Webb, with its significantly larger primary mirror and improved detectors, allows us to see the infrared sky with significantly improved clarity, enabling even more discoveries. For example, Webb's image shows the interstellar gas in unprecedented detail. Here we are zooming into an image of the giant Karina nebula 7,600 light years away taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. The nebula itself measures some 260 light years across. That's about seven times the size of the Orion nebula. Here's Hubble's view of NGC 3324, called the Cosmic Cliffs, located at the northwest corner of the Karina nebula. As we transition this to the Webb near-infrared image, we begin to see hundreds of previously hidden stars. The smallest of these are small, distant, and faint points of light. The largest appear closer, brighter, and more fully resolved, with eight-point diffraction spikes. And even some background galaxies can be seen. The steam that appears to rise from the cloudscape is actually hot ionized gas and hot dust streaming away from the nebula due to intense ultraviolet radiation. The orangish cloudy formation in the bottom half varies intensity and ranges from translucent to opaque. Dramatic pillars rise above the glowing wall of gas, and cavities are being created on the bottom and left by the intense radiation of stellar winds from new stars. Here we are scanning across a broader view of the cloud with the near-infrared combined with the mid-infrared view. Here we are zooming into the southern ring planetary nebula, 2,000 light years away. A planetary nebula is the remains of a star like our Sun after it has run out of hydrogen fuel for fusion. This side-by-side comparison shows Webb's observations in near-infrared light on the left and mid-infrared light on the right. The southern ring has a binary star system at its center. One is a white dwarf. The brighter star in both images has not yet run out of fuel. It closely orbits the dimmer white dwarf, impacting the distribution of the ejected material. Over thousands of years on its path to becoming a white dwarf, the dim star periodically ejected mass that now forms the visible shells of material. In cyclic fashion, it contracted, heated up, and pulsed spewing stellar material in all directions, creating this beautiful landscape. This is not only a crisp image of a planetary nebula, it also shows us objects in the vast distance of space behind it. The transparent red sections of the planetary nebula and all the areas outside are filled with distant galaxies, distant spirals of many shapes and colors also dot the scene. Those that are furthest away or those that are dusty are small and red. Note the bright angled line at the upper left. It's a far away galaxy seen edge on. This image from Hubble released in May 2022 shows the barred spiral galaxy NGC 7496, which lies over 24 million light years away. The spiral arms extend from a distinct bar that crosses the center of the galaxy. These bars are thought to be regions of rich star formation as gas is channeled inward towards their centers. It was expected that Webb was going to clearly see star clusters in the hearts of these dense molecular clouds that Hubble cannot see. As we transition to the web view, we can see that it still picks up the glowing gas, but also shows much more detail. In Hubble's image, the galactic nucleus is just a bright featureless glow. Webb cuts through and shows much greater detail about what's happening in the space around the supermassive black hole around which the galaxy revolves. Here we are zooming into a Hubble image of M74, also known as the Phantom Galaxy. It's a stunning example of a grand design spiral galaxy that is viewed by Earth observers nearly face on. Its perfectly symmetrical spiral arms emanate from the central nucleus and are dotted with clusters of young blue stars and glowing pink H2 regions of ionized hydrogen. Tracing along the spiral arms are winding dust lanes that also begin very near the galaxy's nucleus and follow along the length of the spiral arms. Here we see the web view. The galaxy's spiral arms are rich with star-forming gas seated with young and emerging stars. The galaxy is part of an ongoing astrophysics survey designed to produce a better chart of the connections between young stars and the clouds of cold molecular gas within which they evolve. Webb's early images like this one show that the newly deployed space telescope is going to help immensely in this endeavor. Here's a Hubble view of the Cartwheel Galaxy, a ring galaxy around 500 million light years away. Its striking ring-like feature is a direct result of a smaller galaxy, probably one of the two objects on the left of the ring, that passed through the core of this galaxy. Presumably, the Cartwheel Galaxy was a normal spiral galaxy like our Milky Way before the collision. Here's Webb's combined image from both the near-infrared and mid-infrared cameras. The galaxy has two rings, a bright inner ring and a surrounding colorful outer ring. These two rings have been expanding outwards from the center of the collision for around 440 million years. The bright core contains a tremendous amount of hot dust with the brightest containing gigantic young star clusters. The outer ring is dominated by star formation and supernovas. As this ring expands, it plows into surrounding gas and triggers additional star formation. The galaxy is 150,000 light years across. Our entire Milky Way galaxy could fit inside. Here's a look at the galaxy from just the mid-infrared camera. The pre-collision spiral structure is beginning to re-emerge as seen in the faint arms or spokes between the outer ring and the inner ring. Here we are zooming into a Hubble image of Stefan's quintet. As the name implies, it is a group of five galaxies. The name, however, is a bit of a misnomer. Studies have shown that group member NGC 7320 is actually a foreground galaxy. At 40 million light years away, it is about seven times closer to Earth than the rest of the group. Here's the web image. This mosaic, the composite of near and mid-infrared data, is web's largest image to date, covering an area of the sky about one-fifth the moon's diameter as seen from Earth. At the center of NGC 7319, there is a supermassive black hole around which the galaxy is rotating. This one is active, meaning significant quantities of material are falling into it. These are referred to as galaxies with an active galactic nucleus, or AGN for short. As falling matter approaches the black hole's event horizon, it becomes very hot, and a small percentage of it is pushed away from the black hole in the form of winds and jets, just before it would have passed across the event horizon and never to be seen again. Web has on board a medium resolution spectrometer as part of the mid-infrared instrument to analyze the light spectrum of objects like these to determine the chemical makeup of the material falling into the black hole. With this, scientists can measure spatial structures, determine the velocity of those structures, and get a full range of spectral data. The spectrum reveals the supermassive black hole has a reservoir of colder, denser gas with large quantities of molecular hydrogen and silicate dust that absorbs the light from the central regions of the galaxy. The spectrum, from the black hole's outflow, shows a region filled with hot ionized gases, including iron, argon, neon, sulfur, and oxygen, as denoted by the pixels at given wavelengths. The presence of multiple emission lines from the same element with different degrees of ionization is valuable for understanding the properties and origins of the outflow. Note that the units are brightness. A Janski is a very small unit, 10 to the minus 12 watts, and Webb is detecting down to point 001 Janskis. Picture a dim 1 watt light bulb. Webb can detect a wattage that is zero point 0000000001 watts. It's quite remarkable. In 2017, Hubble took an image of distant galaxies. Thousands of galaxies appeared all across the view. The image fits in a piece of sky approximately the size of a grain of sand held at arm's length. In 2022, Webb examined the same piece of sky, releasing its first deep field image. The detail and clarity improvements are striking. A very bright star is just above the left of center. It has eight bright blue long diffraction spikes. Between four o'clock and six o'clock in its spikes are several very bright galaxies. A group of three are in the middle and two are closer to four o'clock. These galaxies are part of the galaxy cluster SMACS0723. The light we see left the cluster 4.6 billion years ago. You can see that this cluster is warping the appearance of galaxies seen behind them in a process known as gravitational lensing. Here we see Webb's analysis of the few of these galaxies. The oldest galaxy in the picture dates back to 13.1 billion years ago, making it just 700 million years younger than the universe itself. A few have ages ranging from 13 billion to 11.3 billion years. These age estimates come from careful measurement of the red shift for hydrogen and oxygen detected by Webb's instruments. During all the time that light was traveling, the universe was expanding. Light is attached to the space it passes through, so its wavelength is stretched as the space expands, shifting it into the infrared spectrum. The further the shift, the further away the object is. Here we see two similar-looking lensed galaxies between the bright star six o'clock and eight o'clock spikes. Their bright central regions are similar, despite their stretched appearances. The question was, are they two images of the same galaxy or different galaxies? Webb's spectrometer shows how ionized oxygen and atomic hydrogen emission lines are distributed along each arc. The graphs match, indicating that the arcs are mirror images of the same gravitationally lensed galaxy. Here we're back with the original deep field image. Note how it shows a variety of colors and highlights where the dust is, a major ingredient for star formation and ultimately life itself. Blue galaxies contain stars, but very little dust. The red objects in this field are enshrouded in the thick layer of dust. Green galaxies are populated with hydrocarbons and other chemical compounds. Focusing on the oldest galaxy, the 113.1 billion light-years away, Webb was able to determine its chemical composition, its temperature, and the density of its ionized gas. This first James Webb Space Telescope release was an amazing start after such a long wait. I congratulate the entire Webb team and look forward to the coming discoveries. Here are the links to Hubble and the James Webb Space Telescope sites, white papers, and other locations where I found the information contained in this release. These are also the places where you can begin to do your own research. Also, thanks to Jonathan Onsted, there is a How Far Away Is It Wiki available for anyone who wants to engage in conversations about this or any channel video. And don't forget, every video has a document on the HowFarawayIsIt.com website containing all the text, download, and translate as needed. Thanks for watching!