US President Joe Biden released on Monday (early morning today, Tuesday, Greek time) the first photo from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope – this one of a galaxy cluster that reveals the most detailed image of the early universe to date.
The White House’s release of Webb’s first high-definition, color image came on the eve of a larger release of photos and spectral data that NASA plans to present Tuesday at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland.
The $9 billion Webb, the largest and most powerful space telescope ever launched, was designed to probe the world until the dawn of the known universe, heralding a new era of astronomical discovery.
The image presented by Biden and NASA chief Bill Nelson shows a 4.6-billion-year-old galaxy cluster dubbed SMACS 0723, whose combined mass acts as a “gravitational lens” by greatly magnifying incoming light from more distant galaxies behind it.
At least one of the dim, older light images that appear in the photo’s “background”—a composite of light images of different wavelengths—dates back more than 13 billion years, Nelson said. That makes it just 800 million years younger than the Big Bang, the theoretical flashpoint that set in motion the expansion of the known universe about 13.8 million years ago.
“It’s a new window into the history of our world,” Biden said before the photo was unveiled. “And today we’re going to take a look at the first light that came through that window: a light from other worlds, stars orbiting far beyond our own. To me it’s amazing.”
The US president was accompanied to a room in the White House complex by Vice President Kamala Harris, who chairs the US National Space Council.
On Friday, the US space agency posted a list of five celestial objects it had chosen for Webb’s first presentation. These include SMACS 0723, an ornate fragment of the distant world that NASA says offers “the most detailed view of the early universe to date.” It is also the deepest and sharpest infrared image of the distant world ever taken.
The thousands of galaxies were ‘captured’ in a tiny patch of sky about the size of a grain of sand at some distance from someone standing on Earth, Nelson said.
Webb was mainly built by the American aerospace company Northrop Grumman and is named after the head of NASA in the 1960s. It was launched into space for NASA, the European Space Agency (ESA) and the Canadian Space Agency on Christmas 2021 by the French Guyana, on the northeast coast of South America.
Designed to ‘see’ its objects primarily in the infrared part of the spectrum, Webb is about 100 times more sensitive than the Hubble Space Telescope – launched in 1990 – which operates mainly in the optical and ultraviolet parts of the spectrum.
The much larger collecting surface of Webb’s primary mirror, consisting of 18 hexagonal sections made of gold-plated beryllium, allows it to observe objects at greater distances, and thus further back in time, than Hubble or any other telescope.
NASA will also present the first spectroscopic analysis of an exoplanet – about half the mass of Jupiter more than 1,100 light-years away – revealing the molecular ‘signatures’ of filtered light passing through its atmosphere.
Source: RES-MPE
Source: Capital
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