Around 6.20 p.m. EDT, US President Joe Biden unveiled the first public image taken by the Webb Space Telescope, a sea of distant galaxies and bright sharp stars, the most distant view of the Universe to date. The image was shown on a White House screen along with comments from NASA Administrator Bill Nelson. The first image taken by the James Webb Space Telescope is shown on a screen at the White House on July 11 (Nasa) “Mr. President, if you held a grain of sand on the tip of your finger, that’s the part of the universe you see,” Mr. Nelson said, a tiny section of the sky magnified by Webb to reveal thousands of galaxies. “That light that you see in one of these little specks has been traveling for over 13 billion years.” Nasa’s Twitter account posted a higher-resolution version of the image than the one shown at the White House. Foreground stars appear as bright blue-white spikes, while more distant galaxies appear as orange-red blobs, a distortion of their shapes caused by a technique known as gravitational lensing. To capture the image, Webb targeted SMACS 0723, a galaxy cluster closer to Earth, using its gravity as a lens to magnify even more distant galaxies. “Such systems are often called ‘nature’s telescopes,’” University of Chicago cosmologist Michael Glanders said of gravitational lensing in an interview with The Independent, “because they can give us a sharper view of distant galaxies.” The most distant galaxies in Webb’s first image shared on Monday are about 13 billion years old, and therefore 13 billion light-years away, Mr. Nelson noted in his comments, but Webb will look even further into the past as scientists they will be seriously engaged in the observations of the summer. “They go back about 13 and a half billion years,” he said, “and since we know the Universe is 13.8 billion years old, we’re almost back to square one.” US Vice President Kamala Harris struck that note of scientific wonder in her comments about the Webb image and Nasa space science in general on Monday. “Building on the legacy of Hubble, the James Webb Space Telescope allows us to see deeper into space than ever before, and with stunning clarity,” he said. “It will enhance what we know about the origins of our Universe, our Solar System and, possibly, life itself.” In his remarks, President Biden turned his attention from the farthest reaches of space back to American politics and policy, seeing in Webb’s image a sign of America’s ability to succeed. “These images will remind the world that America can do great things,” he said.
