President Biden is set to unveil a “deep field” image captured by the observatory. Perhaps the Webb telescope’s greatest promise is to look at some of the first stars to light up the universe after the Big Bang. While Monday’s snapshot won’t be able to achieve that, it’s a proof of principle for the technique and a hint of what’s to come from scientific instruments that astronomers have waited decades to bring online.
When will the image be revealed and how can I watch it?
The first image will be unveiled Monday at 5 p.m. by President Biden at the White House on NASA TV or the agency’s YouTube channel. The New York Times will also provide live video streaming.
What picture do NASA and Biden show?
On Friday, NASA released a list of five subjects Webb had recorded with its instruments. But Mr. Biden will display just one of them at the White House on Monday. The image is called SMACS 0723. It’s a patch of sky visible from Earth’s southern hemisphere and frequently visited by Hubble and other telescopes in search of the deep past. It includes a huge cluster of galaxies about four billion light-years away that astronomers use as a kind of cosmic telescope. The cluster’s massive gravitational field acts as a lens, distorting and magnifying light from galaxies behind it that would otherwise be too dim and distant to see.
Learn more about the James Webb Space Telescope
After traveling nearly a million miles to reach a site beyond the moon, the James Webb Space Telescope will spend years observing the universe.
Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA’s associate administrator for space science, described this image as the deepest view into our universe’s past. Later images will certainly look even further back, he added. Marcia Rieke of the University of Arizona, who led the construction of one of the cameras on the Webb telescope that took the photo, known as NIRCam, said: “This image won’t hold the ‘deep’ record for long, but it shows clearly a strength of this telescope.”
What about the rest of the images?
NASA will show more photos at 10:30 a.m. ET on Tuesday in a live video stream that you can watch on NASA TV or YouTube. They will be presented at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. The images are a sightseeing tour of the universe painted in colors that no human eye has seen – the invisible rays of infrared or thermal radiation. A small group of astronomers and science experts selected the images to showcase the new telescope’s capability and knock the socks off the public. Among the cosmic images are old friends of both amateur and professional astronomers, who can now see them in new infrared clothing. There’s the Southern Ring Nebula, a shell of gas ejected from a dying star about 2,000 light-years away, and the Carina Nebula, a vast swirling expanse of gas and stars that includes some of the most massive and potentially explosive star systems in the Galaxy. Another well-known astronomical scene is the Stephano Quintet, a tight cluster of galaxies about 290 million light-years from here in the constellation Pegasus. The team will also release a detailed spectrum of an exoplanet known as WASP-96b, a gas giant half the mass of Jupiter that circles a star 1,150 light-years from here every 3.4 days. Such a spectrum is the kind of detail that could reveal what’s in this world’s atmosphere.
Why did it take so long to share the first Webb images?
Reaching space on Christmas Day last year was just the first step for the James Webb Space Telescope. The spacecraft has been orbiting the second Lagrange point, or L2, about a million miles from Earth since January 24. At L2, the gravitational pulls of the sun and Earth keep Webb’s motion around the sun in sync with Earth’s motion. Before it got there, pieces of the telescope had to be carefully unfolded: the sun shield that keeps the instruments cool so they can accurately capture the faint infrared light, the 18 gold-plated hexagonal mirror pieces. For astronomers, engineers and officials watching on Earth, the deployment was a tense time. There were 344 single-point failures, meaning that if any of the actions had not worked, the telescope would have ended up as useless space junk. Everyone worked. The telescope’s four science instruments also had to be activated. In the months following the telescope’s arrival at L2, its operators painstakingly aligned its 18 mirrors. In April, the Mid-Infrared Instrument, or MIRI, which requires the coldest temperatures, was cooled to minus 447 degrees Fahrenheit, and scientists could begin a final series of checks on it. Once these and other steps were taken, the science could begin.
How does Webb compare to Hubble?
The Webb telescope’s main mirror is 6.5 meters in diameter, compared to Hubble’s, which is 2.4 meters, giving Webb about seven times more light-gathering capacity and therefore the ability to see further into the past. Another critical difference is that Webb is equipped with cameras and other instruments sensitive to infrared radiation, or “heat.” The expansion of the universe causes light that would normally be in visible wavelengths to shift to longer infrared wavelengths that are normally invisible to human eyes.
