President Joe Biden released one of Webb’s first images, and it’s the deepest view of the universe ever taken.
The image shows SMACS 0723, where a massive group of galaxy clusters act as a magnifying glass for the objects behind them. Called gravitational lensing, this produced Webb’s first deep-field view of incredibly old and distant, faint galaxies.
The presentation took place at the White House during a preview event with NASA Administrator Bill Nelson.
“This is the deepest image of our universe ever taken,” according to Nelson.
Some of these distant galaxies and star clusters have never been seen before. The galaxy cluster is shown as it looked 4.6 billion years ago.
“This slice of the vast universe covers a patch of sky roughly the size of a grain of sand held at arm’s length by someone on the ground,” according to a NASA release.
The image, taken by Webb’s Near Infrared Camera, is a composite of images taken at different wavelengths of light over 12.5 hours. Capturing the Hubble Space Telescope’s deepest fields took weeks.
The remaining high-resolution color images will make their debut on Tuesday, July 12.
The space observatory, which launched in December, will be able to peer into the atmospheres of exoplanets and observe some of the first galaxies formed since the creation of the universe by observing them through infrared light, which is invisible to the human eye.
The first release of images highlights Webb’s scientific capabilities, as well as the ability of its massive gold mirror and scientific instruments to produce impressive images.
There are several events taking place during Tuesday’s image release, and they will all be streamed live on NASA’s website.
Opening remarks by NASA management and the Webb team will begin Tuesday at 9:45 a.m. ET, followed by an image broadcast beginning at 10:30 a.m. ET. The images will be revealed one by one, and a press conference at 12:30 PM ET will offer details about them.
The first images
NASA shared Webb’s first space targets on Friday, providing a teaser of what else Tuesday’s image release will include: the Carina Nebula, WASP-96b, the Southern Ring Nebula and the Stefan Quintet.
Located 7,600 light-years away, the Carina Nebula is a stellar nursery where stars are born. It is one of the largest and brightest nebulae in the sky and home to many stars much more massive than our sun.
Webb’s study of the gas giant planet WASP-96b will be the first full-color spectrum of an exoplanet. The spectrum will include different wavelengths of light, which could reveal new information about the planet, such as whether it has an atmosphere. Discovered in 2014, WASP-96b is located 1,150 light-years from Earth. It has half the mass of Jupiter and orbits its star every 3.4 days.
The Southern Ring Nebula, also called the “Eight Burst”, is 2,000 light-years from Earth. This large planetary nebula includes an expanding cloud of gas around a dying star.
The Space Telescope’s view of the Stefan Quintet will reveal how the galaxies interact with each other. This compact galaxy group, first discovered in 1787, is located 290 million light-years away in the constellation Pegasus. Four of the five galaxies in the group “are locked in a cosmic dance of repeated close encounters,” according to a NASA statement.
The targets were selected by an international committee including members from NASA, the European Space Agency, the Canadian Space Agency and the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore.
Look forward
These will be the first of many images obtained by Webb, the most powerful telescope ever launched into space. The mission, originally expected to last 10 years, has enough excess fuel to operate for 20 years, according to NASA Deputy Administrator Pam Melroy.
“Webb can see back in time to just after the Big Bang, looking for galaxies that are so far away that light takes many billions of years to travel from those galaxies to ourselves,” said Jonathan Gardner, deputy senior scientist on Webb’s project at NASA, during a recent press conference. “Webb is bigger than Hubble, so it can see fainter galaxies that are further away.”
The telescope’s original goal was to see the universe’s first stars and galaxies, essentially watching “the universe turn on the lights for the first time,” said Eric Smith, Webb program scientist and chief scientist of NASA’s Astrophysics Division.
Smith has worked on Webb since the project began in the mid-1990s.
“The James Webb Space Telescope will give us a new and powerful set of eyes to explore our universe,” Smith wrote in an update on NASA’s website. “The world is about to be new again.”
Add Comment