Our view of the universe has just expanded: The first image from NASA’s new space telescope, unveiled late last night, is full of galaxies and offers the deepest view of the cosmos yet.
The first $10 billion (€9.9 billion) James Webb Space Telescope image is the farthest humanity has ever seen, both in time and distance – closer to the dawn of time and the edge of the universe .
That image will be followed today by the release of four more galactic beauty images from the telescope’s first outward gaze.
The “Deep Field” image released last night at an event at the White House is filled with many stars, with massive galaxies in the foreground and faint and extremely distant galaxies showing through here and there.
Part of the image is light from not too long after the Big Bang, which happened 13.8 billion years ago.
Seconds before unveiling it, President Joe Biden marveled at the image that he said showed “the oldest documented light in the history of the universe from over 13 billion — let me say it again — 13 billion years ago. It’s hard to fathom.”
The busy image with hundreds of dots, stripes, spirals and swirls of white, yellow, orange and red is just “a tiny speck of the universe,” said NASA administrator Bill Nelson.
The images expected today include a view of a giant gas planet beyond our solar system, two images of a nebula where stars are born and die in spectacular beauty, and an update of a classic image of five densely clustered galaxies dancing around each other. .
The world’s largest and most powerful space telescope rocketed from French Guiana in South America last December. It reached its vantage point 1 million miles (1.6 m km) from Earth in January.
Then began the lengthy process of aligning the mirrors, getting the infrared detectors cold enough to work, and calibrating the scientific instruments, all protected by a tennis court-sized sunshade that keeps the telescope cool.
The plan is to use the telescope to look so far back that scientists can glimpse the early days of the universe and zoom in on closer cosmic objects, even our own solar system, with sharper focus.
Webb is the successor to the aging Hubble Space Telescope. Hubble has been looking back 13.4 billion years. It discovered the light wave from an extremely bright galaxy in 2016. Astronomers measure how far back they look in light years, where one light year is 9.3 trillion miles (9.3 trillion km).
“Webb can look back in time to just after the Big Bang by finding galaxies so distant that it took light many billions of years to get from those galaxies to our telescopes,” said Jonathan Gardner, deputy project scientist at webb.
The deepest view of the cosmos isn’t a long-standing record, as scientists are expected to use the Webb telescope to go even deeper.
Thomas Zurbuchen, head of NASA’s science mission, said he became emotional when he saw the images, and so did his colleagues: “It is very difficult not to look at the universe in a new light and not just for a moment. that is very personal.”