President Joe Biden has released one of Webb’s first images, and it is the deepest vision of the universe ever captured.
The image shows SMACS 0723, where a massive group of galaxy clusters act as a magnifying glass for the objects behind it. Called gravitational lenses, this created Webb’s first deep-field view of incredibly ancient and distant galaxies.
The presentation took place at the White House during a previous event with NASA Administrator Bill Nelson.
“It’s the deepest image of our universe ever taken,” according to Nelson.
Some of these distant galaxies and star clusters had never been seen before. The cluster of galaxies is shown as it appeared 4.6 billion years ago.
“This portion of the immense universe covers a piece of sky about the size of a grain of sand held in one arm by someone on the ground,” according to a NASA statement.
The image, taken by Webb’s near-infrared camera, is made up of images taken at different wavelengths of light over 12.5 hours. The deepest fields of the Hubble Space Telescope took weeks to capture.
The rest of the high-resolution color images will debut on Tuesday, July 12th.
The space observatory, which launched in December, will be able to look into the atmospheres of exoplanets and observe some of the first galaxies created after the universe began observing them through infrared light, which is invisible to the Earth. human eye.
The first image release highlights Webb’s scientific abilities, as well as the ability of his large golden mirror and his scientific instruments to produce spectacular images.
There are several events taking place during the publication of images on Tuesday, and all will be broadcast live on the NASA website.
Opening statements by NASA management and the Webb team will begin Tuesday at 9:45 am ET, followed by an image broadcast that will air at 10:30 am ET. The images will be revealed one by one and a press conference at 12:30 pm will give you details about them.
The first images
NASA shared Webb’s first cosmic targets on Friday, providing a teaser on what else will include Tuesday’s image release: the Carina Nebula, WASP-96b, the Southern Ring Nebula, and the Stephan 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 is home to many much more massive stars than our sun.
Webb’s study of the giant gas planet WASP-96b will be the first full-color spectrum of an exoplanet. The spectrum will include different wavelengths of light that 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 completes an orbit around 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 a cloud of gas expanding around a dying star.
A view of the Stephan Quintet space telescope will reveal how galaxies interact with each other. This compact group of galaxies, first discovered in 1787, is 290 million light-years away in the constellation Pegasus. Four of the group’s five galaxies “are locked in a cosmic dance of repeated close encounters,” according to a NASA statement.
The targets were selected by an international committee, which includes members from NASA, the European Space Agency, the Canadian Space Agency and the Baltimore Space Telescope Science Institute.
Looking ahead
These will be the first of many images to come from Webb, the most powerful telescope ever launched into space. According to NASA Deputy Administrator Pam Melroy, the mission, which was initially expected to last 10 years, has enough excess fuel capacity to run for 20 years.
“Webb can look back in time just after the big bang looking for galaxies so far away that light has taken many billions of years to reach from these galaxies to ourselves,” said Jonathan Gardner, senior project assistant scientist Webb 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 initial goal was to see the first stars and galaxies in the universe, basically observing “the universe turning on the lights for the first time,” said Eric Smith, a Webb program scientist and chief scientist in the Division of NASA astrophysics.
Smith has worked at Webb since the project began in the mid-1990s.
“The James Webb Space Telescope will give us a fresh and powerful set of eyes to examine our universe,” Smith wrote in an update on the NASA website. “The world is about to be new again.”