The White House provided a sneak peek of Webb’s first high-resolution, full-color image on the eve of a larger unveiling of photos and spectrographic data that NASA plans to showcase on Tuesday at the Goddard Space Flight Center in suburban Maryland. The Goddard Space Flight Center is located in the United States.
The Webb observatory, which cost $9 billion and was the largest and most powerful space science telescope ever launched, was conceived with the intention of peering through the cosmos all the way back to the beginning of the known universe. This would mark the beginning of a revolutionary new era in the field of astronomical discovery.
According to Nelson, at least one of the faint, older specks of light showing in the “background” of the shot is older than 13 billion years. The photo is a composite of photographs of different wavelengths of light. This puts it only 800 million years younger than the Big Bang, the hypothesised event that is thought to have kicked off the expansion of the universe some 13.8 billion years ago.
Before the photo was shown to the public, Vice President Joe Biden referred to it as “a new window into the history of our cosmos.” “And this is the day that we are going to catch a glimpse of the first light to shine through that window; light that comes from other worlds, orbiting stars far beyond our own. It blows my mind that this is the case.”
At the Old Executive Office Building on the grounds of the White House, he was joined by Vice President Kamala Harris, who presides over the National Space Council of the United States.
From a single speck of sand in the clouds
The United States Space Agency published on Friday a list of the five celestial objects that have been selected to serve as the showcase debut of Webb. Among these is the SMACS 0723 galaxy, which is described by NASA as providing “the most comprehensive glimpse of the early universe to date.” It resembles a bejewelled slice of the distant cosmos. Additionally, it is the infrared image of the distant cosmos that has ever been captured with the greatest depth and resolution.
According to Nelson, the images of the thousands of galaxies were taken in a very small portion of the sky that was roughly the size of a grain of sand when held at arm’s length by someone standing on Earth.
Northrop Grumman Corporation, a global leader in the aerospace industry, was awarded the contract to build Webb. On Christmas Day 2021, it was launched into orbit for NASA as well as its counterparts in Europe and Canada from the country of French Guiana, which is located on the northeastern coast of South America.
After a period of six months during which Webb’s many components were remotely unfolded, aligned, and calibrated, the much anticipated release of the spacecraft’s first imagery was finally made public.
Now that Webb has been fine-tuned and is fully focused, scientists will begin a list of missions that were chosen in a competitive process to investigate the development of galaxies, the life cycles of stars, the atmospheres of distant exoplanets, and the moons of our outer solar system.
Webb is approximately one hundred times more sensitive than its predecessor, the Hubble Space Telescope, which has been in operation for thirty years and operates mostly at optical and ultraviolet wavelengths. Webb was constructed to view its subjects primarily in the infrared spectrum.
It is able to study objects at greater distances, and hence further back in time, than Hubble or any other telescope thanks to the substantially bigger light-collecting surface of the primary mirror of the Webb space telescope, which is an array of 18 hexagonal segments of gold-coated beryllium metal.
All five of Webb’s preliminary targets have already been identified by scientific researchers. The Carina Nebula and the Southern Ring Nebula are two of these gigantic clouds of gas and dust that were propelled into space by supernova explosions to form incubators for young stars. Both of these nebulae are located thousands of light-years away from the Earth.
In addition, the collection contains a galaxy cluster known as Stephan’s Quintet. Stephan’s Quintet was found for the first time in 1877 and is comprised of numerous galaxies that are, in the words of NASA, “engaged in a cosmic dance of repeated close encounters.”
NASA will also present Webb’s first spectrographic analysis of an exoplanet, which will reveal the molecular signatures of filtered light passing through an alien planet’s atmosphere. The exoplanet in question has roughly half the mass of Jupiter and is located more than 1,100 light years away from Earth.
The image that was displayed by Biden and NASA chief Bill Nelson showed a galaxy cluster called SMACS 0723 that is 4.6 billion years old. The combined mass of these galaxies functions as a “gravitational lens,” which distorts space to vastly amplify the light emanating from more distant galaxies behind it.
