“Now we enter a new phase of scientific discovery. Similarly, JWST will produce ever-deeper snapshots of the cosmos, coaxing secrets from the darkness and unveiling realities that humans have never seen before-and maybe never even imagined. Hubble continued to produce deeper and deeper images, stretching the capability of the telescope to see into the early universe. That effort produced one of the most revolutionary images in science: a galaxy-studded pocket of space that profoundly altered conceptions of how the universe is populated. In 1995 the Hubble Space Telescope stared at a seemingly empty patch of sky for a hundred hours. This isn’t the first time scientists have aimed a telescope at a patch of space and waited to see what turned up. “I think it’s almost overwhelmingly beautiful, knowing that the photons you’re imaging here have been in space, on the way to this camera, for over 13 billion years. “It’s clear that the light finds a really complex way to us,” Zurbuchen says. That massive cluster, which is four billion light-years away from Earth, acts like a magnifying lens, allowing the light from extremely old, much more distant galaxies to pop into view. Zurbuchen describes it as an “action shot” because the light from those seemingly countless background galaxies is amplified and distorted by the immense gravity of a galactic cluster-called SMACS 0723-in the foreground. It offers a glimpse of the distant past, when early galaxies were just growing up. The deep-field image released today is, in some ways, analogous to traveling through time. Now, with these first images in hand, it’s clear that JWST is working perhaps even better than expected-and that its next 20 years of science operations will be stuffed with surprises. The observatory’s 21-foot-diameter mirror unfolded, a multi-layer sunshield unfurled, and the instruments cooled to nearly absolute zero. But once there, the telescope successfully performed a complex deployment routine with hundreds of tricky steps. Over the years, multiple delays, mistakes during assembly, budget overruns, and an ongoing controversy about the man for whom the telescope is named plagued JWST’s journey to space. Once the images are on the ground, they’re colored using a palette that corresponds to the different infrared wavelengths. To do that, the $10-billion observatory sees the sky in infrared light, or wavelengths that are slightly longer than what human eyes can perceive. When scientists first envisioned it decades ago, they imagined a telescope that would be able to peer back to the earliest beginnings of the universe, when the first stars and galaxies were emerging from the cosmic murk. Launched on December 25, 2021, JWST is the most powerful telescope to ever take flight. ( Read more about the significance of JWST’s first science images here. “You do see the deepest view of the universe, ever, in that picture,” says NASA’s Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator of the science mission directorate.įour additional images were released on July 12, offering new views of colliding galaxies, the final exhales of a dying star, a massive stellar nursery, and the spectrum of an alien world. As seen through the instrument’s sharp, infrared eye, that little patch is populated by swirling, glowing, gorgeous galaxies, some of which existed more than 13 billion years ago, when the universe was still a toddler. The picture is JWST’s first shot at what astronomers call a deep-field image, when the telescope takes a long look at a tiny patch of space, collecting dim light and revealing extremely distant objects. “And today we’re going to get a glimpse of the first light to shine through that window.” “It’s a new window into the history of our universe,” Biden said during the event. President Joe Biden has unveiled one of them, in which thousands of distant galaxies dapple an inky cosmic sea. And in a special preview event today, U.S. After a million-mile journey into space, NASA’s newest flagship observatory, the James Webb Space Telescope, has captured its first suite of full-color images of the universe.
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