NASA’s first Web telescope image reveals the earliest galaxies formed after the Big Bang

US President Joe Biden issued a statement on Monday The James Webb Space TelescopeFirst images from the preview event at the White House in Washington.

Photo: nasa.gov/webbfirstimages

This first image from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope is the deepest and sharpest infrared image of the distant universe to date.

Known as Webb’s First Deep Field, this image of the galaxy cluster SMACS 0723 is bursting with detail. Thousands of galaxies, including faint objects never seen before in the infrared, appeared in Webb’s view for the first time. This slice of the vast universe covers an area of ​​the sky roughly the size of a grain of sand held within arm’s reach of someone on the ground.

This deep field taken by Webb’s Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam) is a composite of images at different wavelengths reaching a total of 12.5 hours of depth in infrared wavelengths beyond the deep fields of the Hubble Space Telescope.

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The image shows the star cluster SMACS 0723 formed 4.6 billion years ago. The combined mass of this galaxy cluster acts as a gravitational lens, magnifying the distant galaxies behind it. Webb’s NIRCam has brought into sharp focus those distant galaxies that contain never-before-seen small, faint structures, including star clusters and diffuse features.

Researchers will soon begin to learn more about galaxies, their ages, histories and compositions, as Webb searches for the earliest galaxies in the universe.

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Meanwhile, NASA will launch in collaboration with the European Space Agency (ESA) and the Canadian Space Agency (CSA). First full-color images and spectroscopic data from the James Webb Space Telescope during a live broadcast on Tuesday. The images will be released back-to-back by the three space agencies.

The Webb Telescope will be launched on an Ariane 5 rocket from Europe’s spaceport in French Guiana on December 25, 2021, on a mission to unlock the secrets of the universe. The spacecraft traveled for over a month and reached its destination nearly 15,00,000 kilometers from home for an unobstructed view of space.

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