US President Joe Biden unveiled the first full-color image of space taken by the James Webb Space Telescope, offering what NASA says is the “deepest, most distinct infrared view of the universe” ever taken.
During a ceremony at the White House on Monday night, Biden said it was a “historic day” as the world’s largest and most powerful space science telescope offered “a new window into the history of our universe.”
“Today we’re going to see the first light shining through that window,” Biden said shortly before the image was released, showing bright white, yellow and orange lights that NASA says represent “galaxies that were once invisible to us.”
“Light from other worlds orbiting stars far beyond ours,” Biden said. “The oldest documented light in the history of the universe from over 13 billion – let me repeat that – 13 billion years ago.”
The image will be followed on Tuesday by the release of four more galactically beautiful images from the telescope’s initial outward looks.
It’s here—the deepest, most distinct infrared view of the universe yet: Webb’s First Deep Field.
Viewed by @POTUS on July 11, it shows galaxies that were once invisible to us. The full set of @NASAWebb’s first full-color images and data will be revealed on July 12: pic.twitter.com/zAr7YoFZ8C
— NASA (@NASA) July 11, 2022
“We’re going to give humanity a new look at space,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson told reporters last month at a briefing. “And it’s a sight we’ve never seen before.”
The $9 billion Webb Observatory, named for the man who led NASA during the Apollo space program that sent men to the moon in the 1960s, is designed to peer through space to the dawn of the known universe, ushering in a revolutionary era of astronomy discovery.
It took off from French Guiana on the northeastern coast of South America on December 25, 2021, before reaching its final destination 1.6 million kilometers (one million miles) from Earth less than a month later. NASA is collaborating on Webb with the European and Canadian space agencies.
The long-awaited release of its first images follows a six-month process of remotely deploying Webb’s various components, aligning the mirrors and calibrating the instruments.
With Webb now fine-tuned and fully focused, scientists will embark on a competitively curated list of missions exploring the evolution of galaxies, the life cycles of stars, the atmospheres of distant exoplanets and the moons of our outer solar system.
Designed to look at its objects mainly in the infrared spectrum, Webb is about 100 times more sensitive than its 30-year-old predecessor, the Hubble Space Telescope, which operates mainly at optical and ultraviolet wavelengths.
Hubble has already stared 13.4 billion years ago. It discovered the light wave signature of an extremely bright galaxy in 2016. Astronomers measure how far back they appear in light years, with one light year being 9.5 trillion kilometers (5.9 trillion miles).
“Webb can see back in time to just after the Big Bang by looking for galaxies that are so far away that light took many billions of years to reach our telescopes from those galaxies,” said Jonathan Gardner, deputy project scientist on Webb during a recent briefing.
The much larger light-gathering surface of Webb’s primary mirror—an array of 18 hexagonal segments of gold-coated beryllium metal—allows it to observe objects at greater distances, therefore further back in time, than Hubble or anyone else telescope.
All five of Webb’s introductory purposes were known to scholars before this.
Among them are two huge clouds of gas and dust shot 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 two very different sets of galaxy clusters. One of these, the Stefan Quintet, was first identified in 1877 and comprises several galaxies described by NASA as “locked in a cosmic dance of repeated close encounters”.
The other is a much more recent discovery called SMACS 0723, featuring foreground objects so massive that they act as “gravitational lenses,” a visual distortion of space that greatly magnifies light coming from behind to expose even fainter objects further and further back in time.
How far back and what is shown on camera remains to be seen.
Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA’s science mission chief, recently told reporters that with the new telescope, space is “giving up secrets that have been there for many, many decades, centuries, millennia.”
“This is not an image. It’s a new worldview you’re going to see,” he said.
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