The first results from my #JWST time, in a project shared with Tom Ray et al. from the MIRI consortium, a study of the extremely young protostellar outflow, HH211, in Perseus, published in advance form in Nature today.
We took images of HH211 in various short & long-wavelength filters, some narrow-band to focus on the emission lines coming from the shock-excited outflow, but also some medium-band filters to catch the wider nebulosity around the flow.
Turned out that the medium-band filters made for the best colour composites (mostly due to improved noise) – we've made a bunch & will show more later, but this is the one in the paper.
But with JWST, the shorter the wavelength the better at least when it comes to spatial resolution, so the paper also includes an inverted greyscale NIRCam image of HH211 in the bright v=1-0 S(1) line of molecular hydrogen at 2.12 microns. The detail is pretty spectacular, ten times better than anything we've ever seen before in this jet in the infrared.
And as teased yesterday, I can finally reveal the fourth panel in the sequence of images we've been taking of HH211 over the years, following our discovery of it in 1990. As we've gone to bigger & better telescopes, things have improved, not least now with a large, cold, diffraction-limited telescope at L2 🙂
Mark McCaughrean
in reply to Mark McCaughrean • • •Turned out that the medium-band filters made for the best colour composites (mostly due to improved noise) – we've made a bunch & will show more later, but this is the one in the paper.
Mark McCaughrean
in reply to Mark McCaughrean • • •Mark McCaughrean
in reply to Mark McCaughrean • • •Mark McCaughrean
in reply to Mark McCaughrean • • •