![]() ![]() Showing a star “nursery” known as the Carina Nebula, the image resembles a glittering landscape of towering mountains with precipitous cliffs under an uncannily clear night sky. But it was the last image that took my breath away. “We took it before breakfast,” Rigby said.įrom a dying star spewing gas to a quintet of dancing galaxies, every Webb image released today contained previously unseen objects and untold beauty. Compared to its predecessor, the Webb Deep Field shows more detail and only took a fraction of the time to develop. These data confirm that very early stars were creating some of the elements that make up life on our planet.Ī similar image, called the Hubble Deep Field, was taken in 1995 by the Hubble Space Telescope. ![]() Webb scientists have extracted the spectra of one of the earliest galaxies, showing traces of hydrogen, oxygen, and neon atoms. Some of these lensed galaxies are being seen at a time more than 13 billion years ago. “There are galaxies everywhere we look,” said Jane Rigby, Webb’s Project Scientist for Operations, who spoke on NASA TV during the image release this morning.īecause of its immense size, the cluster is magnifying and distorting background galaxies, through an effect called gravitational lensing. The picture captures a patch of sky teeming with galaxies. The target of Webb’s first image was a galaxy cluster in the Southern Sky called SMACS 0723, which is about 5 billion light years away from Earth. The first image from JWST had its debut at the White House with President Joe Biden, who hailed the data release as “a historic moment for science and technology, for astronomy and space exploration, for America and all humanity.” The opening snapshot gave the farthest view of the Universe in infrared light, revealing a panoply of galaxies at the dawn of time. ![]()
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