The “deep field” image that was released at a press screening at the White House in Washington on Tuesday night is filled with lots of stars, massive galaxies in the foreground and faint, extremely distant galaxies that look forward here and there. Part of the image shows light from not too long after the Big Bang, which occurred 13.8 billion years ago.
“We will give humanity a new perspective on the cosmos,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson told reporters last month in a briefing. “And it’s a view we’ve never seen before.”
On Tuesday, the image will be followed by four more galactic “beauty images” from the telescope’s outward views.
Like a grain of sand
The image represents a spot in the sky that is about the size of a grain of sand held at arm’s length, Nelson explains. This small spot contains thousands of galaxies that were formed in the childhood of the universe, just after the big bang.
– A hundred years ago, we thought there was only one galaxy. Today we know that there are billions of galaxies with billions of stars, says Nelson.
– We will be able to answer questions that have not yet been formulated, he continues.
In addition to praising the telescope’s capabilities, President Joe Biden chose to emphasize the importance of the United States for space research.
“These images will remind the world that the United States can still be prominent,” the president said just before the first image was released.
Higher resolution
The James Webb telescope was launched on Christmas Day last year and about a month later it reached its destination in orbit in the solar system.
A stated goal is that it should look further back in time than man has so far succeeded in – and capture light from the first stars and galaxies that were formed and existed after the “big bang”, almost 13.8 billion years ago.
The telescope is powerful with observations in a much larger part of the infrared light spectrum than its predecessor Hubble. The resolution becomes higher, which makes it easier to see the starlight that has been “stretched out” to infrared wavelengths when the universe has expanded.
In the beginning, the telescope looked, among other things, at the huge Carina nebula, whose mysterious and light-year-long gas players have previously been captured by Hubble’s camera.
See the clip below to know more about the super telescope.