NASA reveals first snap from its new Webb Space Telescope, offering deepest look of the cosmos ever
The first image from NASA’s new James Webb Space Telescope unveiled by President Biden on Monday is brimming with galaxies — and offers the deepest look of the cosmos ever captured.
The first “deep field” image from the $10 billion telescope — located 1 million miles from Earth — showed the farthest mankind has ever seen in both time and distance.
The busy image is filled with lots of stars and massive galaxies in the foreground, as well as faint and extremely distant galaxies peeking through in the distance.
Biden said the NASA image showed “light from the oldest galaxies” from some 13 billion years ago — as they appeared not too long after the Big Bang.
NASA Administrator Bill Nelson added the image — filled with hundreds of specks, spirals and swirls of white, yellow, orange and red — showed just “one little speck of the universe.”
“What you’re seeing there is galaxies that are shining around other galaxies where light has been built. You’re seeing just a small little portion of the universe,” Nelson said alongside President Biden at a White House event.
“The light that you are seeing on one of those little specks has been traveling for over 13 billion years.”
Nelson added that this was only the first image to be released — and vowed that NASA would be able to go back even further in time with the telescope.
“We’re going back almost to the beginning, that is the discovery that we are making with this [telescope],” Nelson said.
“It is going to be so precise, you’re going to see whether or not planets… are habitable.”
Four more galactic shots from the telescope are set to be released Tuesday, including a view of a giant gaseous planet outside the solar system, two images of a nebula where stars are born and die and an update of a classic image of five tightly clustered galaxies that dance around each other.
The James Webb Space Telescope, the world’s biggest and most powerful of its kind, was launched from French Guiana in South America last December and reached its intended lookout point a month later.
“6.5 months ago a rocket launched from Earth carrying the world’s newest, most powerful deep space telescope on a journey 1 million miles into the cosmos,” Biden said, adding that the unveiling of the first image was a “historic day.”
Biden noted the rocket deployed a 21-foot wide mirror along the way that was essentially “a sunshield the size of a tennis court and 250,000 tiny shutters, each one smaller than a grain of sand.”
“Put together it’s a new window into the history of our universe. Today we’re going to get a glimpse of the first light to shine through that window. Light from other worlds, orbiting stars far beyond our own, it’s astounding to me.”
Scientists plan to use the telescope to get a glimpse of the dawn of the universe from 13.7 billion years ago — and zoom in on closer cosmic objects with sharper focus.
NASA’s new telescope is the successor to the Hubble Space Telescope, which was launched in 1990 and has been able to stare as far back as 13.4 billion years.
“When NASA launched the Hubble Space Telescope in 1990, we were able to see the stars unobstructed by the Earth’s atmosphere and understand the universe in ways we could have never imagined — even a few decades earlier,” Vice President Kamala Harris said Monday.
“And now we enter a new phase of scientific discovery. Building on the legacy of Hubble, the James Webb Space Telescope allows us to see deeper into space than ever before — and in stunning clarity.”
With Post wires
