The tiny piece of the universe, called SMACS 0723, was captured in sharp detail by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), showing the light from many different twinkling galaxies, among the oldest in the universe. Joe Biden, who unveiled the image at a White House event, called the moment “historic” and said it provides “a new window into the history of our universe.” “It’s hard to even fathom,” the US president said. “It is amazing. It’s a historic moment for science and technology, for America and all of humanity.” Bill Nelson, NASA administrator, said the image shows light from galaxies bending around other galaxies, traveling for billions of years before reaching the telescope. “We’re looking back more than 13 billion years,” he said, adding that more images released by the space agency will reach further back, about 13.5 billion years, near the estimated starting point of the universe itself. “We’re pretty much back to square one,” he said. The image release is a preview of a series of high-resolution color images from the James Webb Space Telescope to be unveiled by Nasa on Tuesday. They will include “the deepest picture of our universe ever taken” according to Nelson. Technicians raise the mirror of the James Webb Space Telescope in 2017. Photo: Laura Betz/AP Experts said the telescope, three decades in the making and launched last year, could revolutionize our understanding of the universe by providing detailed infrared images of the universe, detailing galaxies as they appeared 13 billion years in the past. The $10 billion telescope can peer into the atmospheres of exoplanets and observe some of the oldest galaxies in the universe by using a system of lenses, filters, 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, a professor of astronomy at the University of Arizona. “Webb can look back in time to just after the Big Bang by looking for galaxies that are so far away, it took light many billions of years to get from those galaxies to ourselves,” said Jonathan Gardner, the project’s associate senior scientist at NASA. during a recent press conference. “Webb is bigger than Hubble, so it can see fainter galaxies that are farther away.” The telescope, a joint effort with the European Space Agency, has been in development since the mid-1990s and was finally launched into space in December. Described as the most powerful telescope ever sent into space, it is currently about a million miles from Earth, carrying out its task of probing ancient galaxies. President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris preview the first infrared images from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). Photo: NASA TV/AFP/Getty Images The original goal of the project was to see the first stars and galaxies form after the Big Bang, seeing “the universe turn on the lights for the first time,” as Eric Smith, Webb program scientist and Nasa scientist, put it. The telescope should be considered “one of the great engineering achievements of mankind,” said Kamala Harris, the US vice president. “The whole observatory is performing amazingly well,” said Gillian Wright, director of the UK Astronomy Technology Center in Edinburgh, also principal investigator for the Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI) at JWST. “It’s hard to understand how fantastic it has turned out to be. It’s absolutely amazing.” NASA said Webb has five initial cosmic targets to observe, including the Carina Nebula, a kind of celestial nursery where stars form. The nebula is located about 7,6000 light-years away and hosts many massive stars, several times larger than the sun. Other areas of focus include WASP-96 b, a gas giant planet outside our solar system. the Southern Ring Nebula, an expanding cloud of gas surrounding a dying star 2,000 light-years from Earth, and the Stefan Quintet, known as the first compact group of galaxies discovered in 1877. Images of these targets will be revealed by the NASA on Tuesday. “It’s exciting to see the fantastic image of the James Webb Space Telescope released today,” said Richard Ellis, a professor of astrophysics at University College London, who was part of the panel that conceived the telescope for the first time. “As we ourselves are made of the material that has formed in stars over the last 13 billion years, JWST has the unique ability to trace back to our own origins in this remarkable universe. Everyone can join this amazing adventure.”
