NASA, ESA, CSA and STScI
More than three decades have passed since NASA last built and commissioned a multi-billion dollar space telescope in space, so the James Webb space telescope has accompanied much fanfare.
Unfortunately, the primary mirror of the Hubble Space Telescope was incorrectly polished. So when the first image was unveiled in May 1990, the black and white result was disappointing.
But you can’t say the same about Webb’s first image, which was unveiled Monday by US President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris at an event at the White House. “This telescope is one of mankind’s greatest engineering achievements,” Harris said just before sharing the photo.
She was right. The image (see full size here) shows the deepest and sharpest infrared image of the distant Universe to date – showing just how immense the cosmos is. The area depicted in this image is the size of a grain of sand held at arm’s length by someone standing on the Earth’s surface. This little slice of the universe alone contains thousands of galaxies of incredible variety.
The new image shows the cluster of galaxies known as SMACS 0723, an incredibly massive group of galaxies. This supercluster, rendered as it looked 4.6 billion years ago, allows more distant objects in the background to be magnified by a gravitational lensing effect.
From this image alone, astronomers can gather important information about the structure of these galaxies and discover other details, including their mass, age, composition and more. The image shared Monday night was a composite of images taken at different wavelengths, totaling 12.5 hours.
Previously, the best deep field image of the Universe was collected by the Hubble Space Telescope. In 2009, NASA released an ultra-deep field image after combining decades of images taken by Hubble. The image is the result of Hubble collecting faint light over many hours, allowing it to reveal the most distant observable galaxies at the time. The image contains about 5,500 galaxies, and the faintest galaxies are one ten billionth the brightness of what the human eye can see.
nasa; ESA; G. Illingworth, D. Magee, and P. Oesch, University of California, Santa Cruz; R. Bouwens
The Universe is about 13.7 billion years old, and the Hubble image sees back in time about 13.2 billion years, when most galaxies were smaller, enlarged and often violently collided. Webb should be able to look even further back to identify the earliest galaxies to form in the universe.
NASA plans to release four additional images Tuesday morning, starting at 10:30 a.m. ET (2:30 p.m. UTC). One of the highlights is expected to be an investigation into the atmosphere composition of a nearby exoplanet.
