Washington: The first complete image from the James Webb Telescope, the most powerful telescope ever launched into space, is revealed. US President Joe Biden released the first image in the presence of NASA representatives at the White House in Washington.
Unveiling the image, Biden said it was a "historic moment". “It’s hard to even fathom,” said the US president. “It’s astounding. It’s an historic moment for science and technology, for America and all of humanity.” Biden said.
Bill Nelson, administrator of Nasa, said the image showed the light of galaxies bending around other galaxies, traveling for billions of years before reaching the telescope. “We are looking back more than 13 billion years,” he said, adding that more images to be released by the space agency would reach back further, to about 13.5 billion years, close to the estimated start point of the universe itself. “We are going back almost to the beginning,” he said.
The release of the image is a preview of a series of high-resolution color pictures from JWST that will be shown off by Nasa on Tuesday. They will include “the deepest image of our universe that has ever been taken”, according to Nelson.
The $10bn telescope is able to peek inside the atmospheres of exoplanets and observe some of the oldest galaxies in the universe by using a system of lenses, filters and prisms to detect signals in the infrared spectrum, which is invisible to the human eye. The system has so far “performed flawlessly”, according to Marcia Rieke, professor of astronomy at University of Arizona.
The first image from James Webb Space Telescope is the farthest humanity has ever seen in both time and distance, closer to the dawn of time and the edge of the universe. The image, which was taken over 12.5 hours, is of a giant cluster of galaxies known as SMACS 0723 in the constellation of Volans.
“Webb can see backwards in time just after the big bang by looking for galaxies that are so far away, the light has taken many billions of years to get from those galaxies to ourselves,” said Jonathan Gardner, deputy senior project scientist at Nasa, during a recent news conference. “Webb is bigger than Hubble so that it can see fainter galaxies that are further away.”
The telescope, which is a joint endeavor with the European Space Agency, has been in development since the mid-1990s and was finally propelled into space in December. It is described as the most powerful telescope ever to be sent into space and is currently about 1m miles from Earth, performing its task of scanning ancient galaxies.
The initial goal of the project was to see the first stars and galaxies formed following the big bang, watching “the universe turn the lights on for the first time”, as Eric Smith, Webb program scientist, put it. The telescope should be considered “one of humanity’s great engineering achievements”, said Kamala Harris, the US vice-president.
Nasa said JWST has five initial cosmic targets for observation, including the Carina nebula, a sort of celestial nursery where stars form. The nebula is about 7,600 light years away and is home to many enormous stars, several times larger than the sun.
“It’s exhilarating to see the fantastic James Webb space telescope image released today,” said Richard Ellis, professor of astrophysics at University College London who was part of the committee that first conceived the telescope.
-The Guardian