NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has captured the sharpest infrared image of the distant Universe yet. The photo, Webb’s First Deep Fieldshows great detail of SMACS 0723, a cluster of galaxies.
US President Joe Biden unveiled the photo Monday evening at the White House during a brief meeting. The image, taken by the largest space telescope ever built, shows “a remote patch of sky where young galaxies are still making their way to the sky just 600 million years after the Big Bang,” it writes. The New York Times†
Thousands of galaxies — including the faintest objects ever seen in the infrared — have been recorded for the first time. This part of the vast universe occupies a patch of sky about the size of a grain of sand held at an arm’s length.
The deep field, captured by Webb’s camera (NIRCam), is a composite of images at different wavelengths, with a total duration of 12.5 hours. This technique has achieved depths at infrared wavelengths beyond what the Hubble Space Telescope could capture in weeks.
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Biden praised NASA for the work the organization has done to allow the telescope to function optimally. “We can see opportunities that no one has seen before,” the president said. “We can go to places that no one has gone before.”
Biden’s unveiling sets the stage for the telescope’s grand cosmic slideshow set to take place Tuesday morning, when scientists will reveal what the Webb has been looking at for the past six months.