The sneak peek of the White House from Webb’s first full-color, high-resolution image came on the eve of a larger unveiling of photos and spectrographic data that NASA plans to present Tuesday at the Goddard Space Flight Center in suburban Maryland.
The $9 billion Webb Observatory, the largest and most powerful space science telescope ever launched, was designed to peer across the cosmos toward the dawn of the known universe, ushering in a revolutionary era of astronomical discovery.
The image shown by Biden and NASA chief Bill Nelson showed the 4.6 billion-year-old galaxy cluster called SMACS 0723, whose combined mass acts as a “gravity lens,” distorting space to capture light emanating from further afield. greatly magnifying distant galaxies beyond.
At least one of the faint, older light specs that appear in the photo’s “background” — a composite of images of different wavelengths of light — dates back more than 13 billion years, Nelson said. That makes it only 800 million years younger than the Big Bang, the theoretical flashpoint that initiated the expansion of the known universe some 13.8 billion years ago.
“It’s a new window into the history of our universe,” Biden said before the photo was unveiled. “And today we’re going to glimpse the first light that shines through that window: light from other worlds, orbiting stars far beyond our own. It’s amazing to me.”
Vice President Kamala Harris, chairman of the US National Space Council, joined him in the Old Executive Office Building of the White House complex.
OF GRAIN OF SAND IN HEAVEN
On Friday, the space agency posted a list of five celestial bodies chosen for Webb’s showcase debut. These include SMACS 0723, a bejeweled swath of the distant cosmos that NASA says provides “the most detailed image of the early universe yet.” It also forms the deepest and sharpest infrared image ever captured of the distant cosmos.
The thousands of galaxies were trapped in a tiny patch of sky, about the size of a grain of sand held at arm’s length by someone standing on Earth, Nelson said.
Webb was built under contract by aerospace giant Northrop Grumman Corp. It was launched to space on Christmas Day 2021 from French Guiana, on the northeast coast of South America, for NASA and its European and Canadian counterparts.
The highly anticipated release of the first images follows six months of remotely deploying Webb’s various components, aligning the mirrors and calibrating instruments.
Now that Webb is fine-tuned and fully focused, scientists will embark on a competitively selected list of missions investigating the evolution of galaxies, the life cycles of stars, the atmospheres of distant exoplanets and the moons of our outer solar system.
Built to view his subjects primarily in the infrared spectrum, Webb is about 100 times more sensitive than its 30-year-old predecessor, the Hubble Space Telescope, which operates primarily at optical and ultraviolet wavelengths.
The much larger light-gathering surface of Webb’s primary mirror—a series of 18 hexagonal segments of gold-plated beryllium metal—allows him to observe objects at greater distances, ie further back in time, than Hubble or any other telescope.
All five of Webb’s preliminary goals were previously known to scientists. Below that are two huge clouds of gas and dust that are blown into space by stellar explosions to form incubators for new stars – the Carina Nebula and the Southern Ring Nebula, each thousands of light-years from Earth.
The collection also includes clusters of galaxies known as Stephan’s Quintet, which was first discovered in 1877 and includes several galaxies described by NASA as “trapped in a cosmic dance of repeated close encounters.”
NASA will also present Webb’s first spectrographic analysis of an exoplanet — about half the mass of Jupiter more than 1,100 light-years away — and reveal the molecular signatures of filtered light passing through its atmosphere.