On Monday, US President Joe Biden unveiled the first image taken by the world’s most powerful telescope.
The James Webb Space Telescope, a $10 billion joint venture between NASA, the Canadian Space Agency and the European Space Agency, captured five images that chart humanity’s journey through space history, from gas planets to massive nebulae.
The first image shows the farthest distance humanity has ever seen in both time and distance, with the remaining four images to be released on Tuesday by NASA.
It’s here—the deepest and sharpest infrared view of the universe yet: The Web’s First Deep Field.
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—@NASA
The deep-field image, released at a White House event, is full of stars, with massive galaxies in the foreground and faint and extremely distant galaxies peeking out here and there. Part of the image is light from shortly after the Big Bang, which took place 13.8 billion years ago.
The captured scene shows a miniature piece of sky, roughly the size of a grain of sand, held at arm’s length by someone on the ground, according to NASA’s website.
Seconds before unveiling it, Biden marveled at the image, which he said showed “the oldest documented light in the history of the universe from over 13 billion — let me repeat that — 13 billion years ago. It’s hard to understand.”
The crowded image, with hundreds of spots, stripes, spirals and swirls of white, yellow, orange and red, is just “one tiny speck of the universe,” said NASA Administrator Bill Nelson.
The telescope, which was launched last December, is located 1.6 million kilometers from Earth and is considered the successor to the aging Hubble Space Telescope.
Although Hubble has been able to see distant galaxies, it does not have the resolution of Webb, which is optimized to see in the longer wavelengths of the infrared spectrum, giving it much greater clarity and sensitivity. The images it produces will be much sharper, revealing much more detail.
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