James Webb Space Telescope’s First Year of Discoveries – 16 July 2023

James Webb Space Telescope’s First Year of Discoveries (6:00 min) Audio Mp3 https://xenagoguevicene.files.wordpress.com/2023/07/16july2023pm8jwts.mp3
Wednesday, 12 July 2023, marked the first anniversary of the start of science operations of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), the most powerful space-based astronomical observatory ever launched. It is jointly operated by NASA, the Canadian Space Agency (CSA) and the European Space Agency (ESA) and has, over the past year, already provided countless insights into the natural world, from inside the Solar System to the farthest reaches of the Universe.

The first anniversary of JWST was celebrated with the release of new data of the star-forming region Rho Ophiuchi. It is the nearest such cloud complex to Earth, about 390 light years away by the most recent estimates (a mere 3.7 million billion kilometers or 2.3 million billion miles), and one of the most studied. The image from the telescope shows about 50 very young stars, all 1 million years old or less (compared to our Sun’s age of 4.6 billion years), all of which are about the mass of the Sun.