On Monday, U.S. President Joe Biden unveiled the first image taken by the world’s most powerful telescope.
The James Webb Space Telescope, a US $ 10 billion joint venture between NASA, the Canadian Space Agency and the European Space Agency, has photographed five images depicting humanity’s journey through cosmic history. from gaseous planets to massive nebulae.
The first image shows the farthest humanity has ever seen in both time and distance, and the remaining four images will be released on Tuesday by NASA.
It’s here: the deepest, sharpest infrared view of the universe to date: Webb’s first deep field.
Previewed by pic.twitter.com/zAr7YoFZ8C
– @ NASA
The “deep field” image posted at a White House event is full of stars, with massive galaxies in the foreground and faint, extremely distant galaxies looking here and there. Part of the picture is light not long after the Big Bang, which took place 13.8 billion years ago.
“We will give humanity a new vision of the cosmos,” NASA administrator Bill Nelson told reporters last month in a briefing. “And it’s a sight we’ve never seen before.”
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 Webb’s resolution, which is optimized to see at the longest wavelengths of the infrared, giving it much more clarity and sensitivity. The images you produce will be much sharper, revealing many more details.