![]() While Juno’s recent flyby of Europa was short - just two hours - its observations will be used to support future missions to the intriguing moon, including NASA’s Europa Clipper. Europa's water would be locked in a subsurface ocean buried miles beneath its icy surface, but researchers think it still could host the conditions necessary to support life. Hidden beneath this worn and gnarled surface may be a haven for life, as Europa is one of the worlds in our solar system that scientists think could harbor liquid water. Near the terminator, the boundary between light and dark, lies a strange pit that might be a degraded impact crater. Bright and dark ridges and troughs crisscross the surface like scars. And thanks to the contrast between the day and nightside, terrain features are also brought into view. The craft’s JunoCam zoomed in on Annwn Regio, a fractured region near Europa’s equator. One look at the image above and you can get a sense of how close Juno got to the jovian moon. The pass was only a mile shy of the closest visit on record, set by NASA’s Galileo mission in 2000. Juno swept within 219 miles (352 kilometers) of the icy world on Thursday, Sept. "The team is excited about more discoveries to come when JWST turns its eye on the CANUCS galaxy clusters next month.NASA’s Juno spacecraft just made the closest flyby of Jupiter’s moon, Europa, in over two decades. "Our study of the Sparkler highlights the tremendous power in combining the unique capabilities of JWST with the natural magnification afforded by gravitational lensing," says CANUCS team lead Chris Willott from the National Research Council's Herzberg Astronomy and Astrophysics Research Centre. Moreover, gravitational lensing produces three separate images of the Sparkler, allowing astronomers to study the galaxy in greater detail. The Sparkler galaxy is special because it is magnified by a factor of 100 due to an effect called gravitational lensing-where the SMACS 0723 galaxy cluster in the foreground distorts what is behind it, much like a giant magnifying glass. This changed with JWST's increased resolution and sensitivity, unveiling the tiny dots surrounding the galaxy for the first time in Webb's First Deep Field image. Until now, astronomers could not see the surrounding compact objects of the Sparkler galaxy with the Hubble Space Telescope (HST). Globular clusters are ancient collections of stars from a galaxy's infancy and contain clues about its earliest phases of formation and growth.įrom their initial analysis of 12 of these compact objects, the researchers determined that five of them are not only globular clusters but among the oldest ones known. This galaxy got its name for the compact objects appearing as small yellow-red dots surrounding it, referred to by the researchers as "sparkles." The team posited that these sparkles could either be young clusters actively forming stars-born three billion years after the Big Bang at the peak of star formation-or old globular clusters. In the finely detailed Webb's First Deep Field image, the researchers zeroed in on what they've dubbed "the Sparkler galaxy," which is nine billion light years away. ![]() "This discovery in Webb's First Deep Field is already providing a detailed look at the earliest phase of star formation, confirming the incredible power of JWST." "JWST was built to find the first stars and the first galaxies and to help us understand the origins of complexity in the universe, such as the chemical elements and the building blocks of life," says Lamiya Mowla, Dunlap Fellow at the Dunlap Institute for Astronomy & Astrophysics at the University of Toronto and co-lead author of the study. The early analysis of Webb's First Deep Field image, which depicts some of the universe's earliest galaxies, is published today in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.
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