Some of the most famous Hubble Space Telescope images feature this nebula in visible light, but JWST shows it in “infrared fireworks,” Pontoppidan says. This image shows the “Cosmic Cliffs,” part of the enormous Carina nebula, a region about 7,600 light-years from Earth where many massive stars are being born. The visible galaxies are fewer and not as far away. This Hubble Space Telescope image of the galaxy cluster SMACS 0723 shows the same spot of sky as the JWST image above. What we’ve seen today with these images is essentially that we’re ready now.” (JWST is an international collaboration among NASA, ESA and the Canadian Space Agency.) “It’s a culmination of decades of work, but it’s just the beginning of decades. Every five days, we’re getting more data,” European Space Agency science advisor Mark McCaughrean said at the July 12 briefing. “These are pictures just taken over a period of five days. The cache of first images and data showcases space scenes both near and far, glimpses of single stars and entire galaxies, and even a peek into the chemical composition of a far-off planet’s atmosphere. “Scientists will very quickly beat that record and go even deeper.”īut JWST wasn’t built only to peer deeper and farther back in time than ever before. NASA, ESA, CSA, STScIĪlthough that first image represents the deepest view of the cosmos to date, “this is not a record that will stand for very long,” astronomer Klaus Pontoppidan of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore said in a June 29 news briefing. “You can really zoom in and play around.” This composite of images, revealing thousands of galaxies, is the deepest view of the universe ever captured - a record astronomers don’t expect to last long. “There’s a sharpness and a clarity we’ve never had,” said Rigby, of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. Those features give it an edge over previous observatories. It also sees in the infrared wavelengths of light where distant galaxies appear. But the James Webb Space Telescope, also known as JWST, is incredibly large - at 6.5 meters across, its mirror is nearly three times as wide as that of the Hubble Space Telescope. The mass from those closer galaxies distorts spacetime in such a way that objects behind the cluster are magnified, giving astronomers a way to peer more than 13 billion years into the early universe.Įven with that celestial assist, other existing telescopes could never see so far. The galaxies captured in the first released image lie behind a cluster of galaxies about 4.6 billion light-years away. Everywhere we look, there’s galaxies everywhere.” Going deep “That’s been true of every image we’ve taken with Webb. And it’s teeming with galaxies,” said JWST Operations Scientist Jane Rigby at the July 12 briefing.
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