For six weeks, a mix of astronomers, press officers and science communicators at the Space Telescope Science Institute raced to assemble an early highlight reel for the $10 billion James Webb Space Telescope
A woman reacts as an image from the James Webb Space Telescope is shown on a monitor during a presentation at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, on July 12, 2022. In June, specialists gathered in Baltimore to select images from the James Webb Space Telescope to share with the public; keeping the results to themselves hasn’t been easy. (Michael A. McCoy/The New York Times
BALTIMORE — After the image flashes up on the projector, a few quiet beats tick by, punctuated only by a soft “wow.” Everyone is processing. Then more “wows” bubble out, and people are talking over one another, laughing. Suddenly two astronomers, Amaya Moro-Martin and Karl Gordon, are out of their chairs, sticking their noses closer to the space fantasia onscreen, agog — “It’s a jet! This is full of jets!” — at the crisp, hallucinatory grandeur of new stars sprouting from a nebula like seeds from a flower bed.
The screen zooms in, in, in toward a jutting promontory many light-years long that stands out in sharp relief.
“Oh my God,” someone says — only that someone was me, accidentally.
“Welcome to the team,” someone else responds.
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