It shows a cluster of galaxies called SMACS 0723. The deep field image is filled with many stars, with massive galaxies in the foreground and faint and extremely distant galaxies peeking 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.
“We’re looking back more than 13 billion years… and we’re moving forward, we’re going back 13.5 billion years, this is just the first image and since we know the universe is 13.8 billion years old, we’re almost going back to the beginning,” said NASA administrator Bill Nelson.
“It’s so precise that you’re going to see if planets are habitable. And when you look at something this big, we can answer questions that we don’t even know what the questions are yet.”
NASA will unveil more images from the telescope on Tuesday, including a view of a giant gaseous planet outside 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 orbiting around the planet. dance to each other.
The Webb telescope is the most powerful observatory ever placed in orbit. It was launched from French Guiana last December and reached its vantage point 1 million miles from Earth in January.
Scientists hope 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Webb is considered the successor to the highly successful but outdated Hubble Space Telescope, which looks back 13.4 billion years.
“Webb can look back in time to just after the Big Bang by finding galaxies so distant that light took many billions of years to get from those galaxies to our telescopes,” said Jonathan Gardner, Webb’s deputy project scientist. during an earlier briefing.