Nasa and the James Webb Space Telescope just peered billions of years further into the past than ever before, and brought photos home for all to see.
Around 6.20pm EDT, US President Joe Biden revealed the very first public image taken by the Webb telescope, a sea of distant galaxies and good spiky stars, essentially the most distant view yet of the Cosmos. The image was presented on a screen on the White House together with comments by Nasa Administrator Bill Nelson.
The primary image taken by the James Webb Space Telescope is projected on a screen on the White House on 11 July
(Nasa)
“Mr President, should you held a grain of sand on the tip of your finger at arms length, that’s the a part of the universe you might be seeing,” Mr Nelson said, a tiny portion of the sky magnified by Webb to disclose hundreds of galaxies. “That light you might be seeing on considered one of those little specks, has been traveling for over 13 billion years.”
Nasa’s Twitter account published a better resolution version of the image than was projected on the White House.
Stars within the foreground appear as good blue white spikes, while essentially the most distant galaxies appear as orange-red smears, a distortion of their shapes brought on by a way often known as gravitational lensing. To take the image, Webb targeted SMACS 0723, a galaxy cluster closer to Earth, using its gravity as a lens to magnify much more distant galaxies.
“Such systems are sometimes called ‘nature’s telescopes,’” University of Chicago cosmologist Michael Gladders said of gravitational lensing in an interview with The Independent, “as they may give us a sharper view of distant galaxies.”
The furthest galaxies in the primary Webb image shared Monday are about 13 billion years old, and due to this fact 13 billion light years away, Mr Nelson noted in his comments, but Webb will look even further into the past as scientists taken up observations in earnest over the summer.
“They’re going back about 13 and a half billion years,” he said, “and since we all know the Universe is 13.8 billion-years-old, we’re going back almost to the start.”
US Vice President Kamala Harris took up that note of scientific wonder in her comments concerning the Webb image and Nasa space science generally on Monday.
“Constructing on the legacy of Hubble, the James Webb Space Telescope allows us to see deeper into space than ever before, and in stunning clarity,” she said. “It can enhance what we all know concerning the origins of our Universe, our System System and possibly, life itself.”
In his comments, President Biden turned his attention from the furthest reaches of space back to American policy and politics, seeing within the Webb image an indication of America’s capability to attain.
“These images are going to remind the world, that America can do big things,” he said.
