During a ceremony at the White House on Monday night, Biden said it was “a historic day” as the world’s largest and most powerful scientific telescope offered a “new window into the history of the universe.” “Today we’re going to take a look at the first light to shine through this window,” Biden said shortly before releasing the image, which showed bright white, yellow and orange lights that NASA said represented “galaxies that once they were invisible to us.” “Light from other worlds, orbiting stars far beyond our own,” Biden said. “The oldest documented light in the history of the universe from over 13 billion – let me say that again – 13 billion years ago.” The image will be followed on Tuesday by the release of four more galactic beauty shots from the telescope’s initial outward looks. It’s here – the deepest, sharpest infrared view of the universe yet: Webb’s first deep field. Previewed by @POTUS on July 11th, it shows galaxies that were once invisible to us. The full set of @NASAWebb’s first color images and data will be revealed on July 12: pic.twitter.com/zAr7YoFZ8C — NASA (@NASA) July 11, 2022 “We’re going to give humanity a new view of the universe,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson told reporters last month at a briefing. “And it’s a sight we’ve never seen before.” The $9 billion Webb Observatory, named after the man who ran NASA during the Apollo space program that put men on the moon in the 1960s, is designed to peer through the world until the dawn of the known universe, ushering in a revolutionary era of astronomy. discovery. It soared from French Guiana to the northeastern coast of South America on December 25, 2021, before reaching its final destination, 1.6 million kilometers (one million miles) from Earth less than a month later. NASA is collaborating on Webb with the European and Canadian space agencies. The long-awaited release of its first image follows a six-month process of remotely deploying Webb’s various components, aligning its mirrors and calibrating the instruments. With Webb now fine-tuned and fully focused, scientists will launch a competitively selected list of missions that will explore the evolution of galaxies, the life cycles of stars, the atmospheres of distant exoplanets and the moons of our outer solar system. Built to see its subjects primarily in the infrared spectrum, Webb is about 100 times more sensitive than its 30-year-old predecessor, the Hubble Space Telescope, which operates primarily in optical and ultraviolet wavelengths. Hubble has looked as far back as 13.4 billion years. It found the light wave signature of an extremely bright galaxy in 2016. Astronomers measure how far back they appear in light years, with a light year being 9.5 trillion kilometers (5.9 trillion miles). “Webb can look back in time, right after the Big Bang, looking for galaxies that are so far away that light took many billions of years to get from those galaxies to our telescopes,” said Jonathan Gardner, associate scientist of the Webb program during a recent update. The much larger light-gathering surface of Webb’s primary mirror—an array of 18 hexagonal sections of gold-coated beryllium metal—allows it to observe objects at greater distances, therefore further back in time, than Hubble or any other telescope. All five of Webb’s introductory targets were previously known to scientists. Among them are two huge clouds of gas and dust that were blasted into space by stellar explosions to form incubators for new stars – the Carina Nebula and the Southern Ring Nebula, each thousands of light-years from Earth. The collection also includes two very different sets of galaxy clusters. One of them, the Stephan Quintet, was first identified in 1877 and includes several galaxies described by NASA as “locked in a cosmic dance of repeated close encounters”. The other is a much more recent discovery called SMACS 0723, with foreground objects so massive they act as “gravitational lenses,” an optical distortion of space that greatly magnifies light coming from behind them to expose even fainter objects more far and further back in time. How far back and what was seen on camera remains to be seen. Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA’s science mission chief, recently told reporters that with the new telescope, the world is “giving up secrets that have existed for many, many decades, centuries, millennia.” “It’s not a picture. It’s a new worldview that you’re going to see,” he said.
