NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has produced the deepest and sharpest infrared image of the distant universe to date.
Thousands of galaxies – including the faintest objects ever observed in the infrared – have been unveiled by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope for the first time.
The image, known as Webb’s First Deep Field, shows the galaxy cluster SMACS 0723 where a massive group of galaxy clusters act as a magnifying glass for the objects behind them. The image exhibited a distant patch of sky in which fledgling galaxies were burning their way into visibility just 600 million years after the Big Bang.
US President Joe Biden has unveiled the first full-color image of the cosmos taken by the James Webb Space Telescope, offering what NASA said was “the deepest, sharpest infrared view of the universe” ever taken.
“It’s a new window into the history of our universe,” Biden said during the event. “This is the oldest documented light in the history of the universe from 13 billion — let me say that again, 13 billion — years ago,” he added.
“Webb’s First Deep Field is not only the first full-color image from the James Webb Space Telescope, it’s the deepest and sharpest infrared image of the distant universe, so far. This image covers a patch of sky approximately the size of a grain of sand held at arm’s length. It’s just a tiny sliver of the vast Universe,” said NASA Administrator Bill Nelson.
“It’s not an image. It’s a new world view that you’re going to see,” said Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA’s science mission chief. He told reporters that with the new telescope, the cosmos is “giving up secrets that had been there for many, many decades, centuries, millennia”.