The James Webb Space Telescope sees its first star as it is about to complete the first phase of a process that will take months; a process that includes aligning the observatory’s primary mirror using the near-infrared camera (NIRCam).
The team’s challenge was twofold: to confirm that NIRCam was ready to capture light from celestial objects and then to identify starlight from the same star in each of the 18 segments of the primary mirror.
The result is an image mosaic of 18 randomly arranged points of starlight created by Webb’s unaligned mirror segments reflecting light from the same star in Webb’s secondary mirror and NIRCam’s detectors.
What appears as a simple blur of starlight will form the basis for aligning and focusing the telescope so that this northern summer Webb can provide unprecedented views of the universe. Over the next month, the telescope team will gradually adjust the mirror segments until all 18 images become a single star.
“The Webb team is elated with how well the first steps in imaging and aligning the telescope are going. We were very happy to see the light reach NIRCam,” said Marcia Rieke, principal investigator of the NIRCam instrument and regents professor of astronomy at the University of Arizona.
NASA‘s James Webb Space Telescope was launched on December 25, 2021. It is, by far, the most technologically advanced space telescope as it is seven times more sensitive than the nearly 32-year-old Hubble Space Telescope and three times larger.
Hubble’s successor is designed to look further into the past to study the first stars and galaxies that flickered at the dawn of time, 13.7 billion years ago. It is also expected to reveal more information about exoplanets, i.e. planets orbiting stars other than the Sun.
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