GREENBELT, Md. – President Biden helped to reveal the first image from NASA’s newest James Webb Space Telescope Monday evening, providing the deepest look into space thus far.
NASA on Tuesday will also unveil more full-color images returned by the telescope, the $10 billion observatory that launched Christmas Day 2021 and now resides over 1 million miles from Earth, honing in on the great beyond.
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NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said the light shown in the image gives us a glimpse at galaxies forming billions of years ago.
“This slice of the vast universe covers a patch of sky approximately the size of a grain of sand held at arm’s length by someone on the ground,” the NASA website said about the picture.
It's here–the deepest, sharpest infrared view of the universe to date: Webb's First Deep Field.
— NASA (@NASA) July 11, 2022
Previewed by @POTUS on July 11, it shows galaxies once invisible to us. The full set of @NASAWebb's first full-color images & data will be revealed July 12: https://t.co/63zxpNDi4I pic.twitter.com/zAr7YoFZ8C
The agency released an engineering test image last week after seeing how well the telescope’s Fine Guidance Sensor could stay locked on to a target, according to a news release. The picture was taken over a period of eight days in early May, in a combined 32 hours of exposure.
NASA explained how one can tell the difference between galaxies and stars in the test image because of the stars’ six characteristic diffraction spikes, which appear due to the telescope’s six-sided mirrors.
So, looking past the few stars, every disk, swirl and smudge in the picture below is another galaxy that’s just as complex as our own.
“The faintest blobs in this image are exactly the types of faint galaxies that Webb will study in its first year of science operations,” said Jane Rigby, Webb’s operations scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight enter in Greenbelt, Maryland.
Webb scientists said it is among the deepest images of the universe ever taken despite its noticeable roughness, yet NASA Administrator Bill Nelson announced June 29 that the pictures being released July 12 will include the conclusive “deepest image of our universe that has ever been taken.”
Learn more on NASA’s blog by clicking here.
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