NEWSFLASH

NASA recently released the first images from the James Webb Space Telescope. The telescope — the most powerful sent to space — was launched December 25 from French Guiana and now orbits the sun, about 1 million miles from Earth. Webb’s camera can see infrared light, a light the human eye cannot see.

The Webb telescope is larger and is designed to look deeper into space than the Hubble Space Telescope. The Hubble Space Telescope was launched into space in 1990 and has made more than 1.5 million observations while orbiting Earth. Most of the Hubble’s images are not infrared, so they are often clouded by dust and gas that Webb can see through.

Called the Cosmic Cliffs, Webb’s seemingly three-dimensional picture looks like craggy mountains on a moonlit evening. In reality, it is the edge of the giant, gaseous cavity within NGC 3324, and the tallest “peaks” in this image are about 7 light-years high. The cavernous area has been carved from the nebula by the intense ultraviolet radiation and stellar winds from extremely massive, hot, young stars located in the center of the bubble, above the area shown in this image.

The blistering, ultraviolet radiation from the young stars is sculpting the nebula’s wall by slowly eroding it away. Dramatic pillars tower above the glowing wall of gas, resisting this radiation. The “steam” that appears to rise from the celestial “mountains” is actually hot, ionized gas and hot dust streaming away from the nebula due to the relentless radiation.

The Webb telescope will explore four areas of science: early universe, galaxies over time, the star life cycle and other worlds. Over the next five-and-a-half years or more, the telescope will be able to observe galaxies that formed about 400 million years after the big bang — which is the idea that the universe began at a single point and expanded from there.

The telescope was named after NASA’s second administrator, James Webb, who is best known for leading the Apollo missions, which landed the first humans on the moon.

Manhattanhenge – special New York phenomenon

The term Manhattenhenge was coined by astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson. The name is a New Yorker-style nod to Stonehenge, the ancient rock structure in the English countryside that aligns with the sunsets and sunrises during the summer and winter solstices.

That pre-modern monument was purposely built for religious and spiritual reasons. In contrast, the grid of New York City was not designed with sunsets in mind, but it has ended up functioning in a similar manner. Across four days every May and July, when the weather cooperates, it can bring people together to admire the particular geographic location in the cosmos as the sun settles into the horizon, disappearing perfectly along the city’s broad west-east corridors.

The sunrise aligns with the Manhattan grid in December and January, the so-called Reverse Manhattanhenges flanking the winter solstice, however, the summer alignment is by far the most popular with visitors.

An event like Manhattanhenge can halt the entire borough, beckoning people to celebrate an otherwise normal daily sunset.