The Canadian Space Agency released a video Thursday made up of new images from the James Webb Telescope. It travels 2,000 light-years in 20 seconds, to the Austral Ring Nebula, of which two images had already been revealed last week.
The clarity of these images of the cosmos results among other things from the work of the Canadian Precision Guidance Sensor (FGS), a crucial element of the James Webb Telescope, indicates the Canadian Space Agency in the Facebook post from which the video originates. The agency says on its website that Canada’s FGS “points to bright stars in deep space to stabilize the Webb telescope so images are clear.”
The shroud of a dying star, the Astral Ring Nebula, seen in the video, is a “planetary” or disc-shaped, planet-like nebula. It is located about 2500 light years from Earth.
In the images of the nebula revealed last week, two stars can be distinguished: a red one which has just died and which is at the origin of the nebula, and a white one, “bright and still alive”, explained to the To have to Nathalie Ouellette, in charge of scientific communications for the James Webb telescope in Canada and coordinator of the Institute for Research on Exoplanets at the University of Montreal.
The telescope, from which these images come, “will be the most important space observatory of the next decade for astronomers around the world”, according to the Canadian Space Agency. Launched in 2021, the telescope is the result of a collaboration between NASA, the European Space Agency, and the Canadian Space Agency.
To see in video