Webb Telescope: The first image reveals the earliest galaxies formed after Big Bang
In a sneak peek ceremony held at the White House in Washington on Monday, US President Joe Biden unveiled one of the initial photographs of the James Webb Space Telescope. The deepest and cleanest infrared image of the distant universe has been captured to date in this first image from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope.
This incredibly detailed image of the galaxy cluster SMACS 0723 is known as Webb’s First Deep Field. Numerous galaxies, including the infrared universe’s faintest objects ever seen, have first emerged in Webb’s field of vision. This portion of the enormous cosmos fills a piece of sky about the size of a grain of sand stretched out at arm’s length.
The depths at infrared wavelengths reached by this deep field, captured by Webb’s Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam), were infrared wavelengths beyond the deepest fields, which took the Hubble Space Telescope weeks to reach.
The picture depicts the SMACS 0723 galaxy cluster as it appeared 4.6 billion years ago. This galaxy cluster’s total mass works as a gravitational lens, enlarging even farther away galaxies in its wake. These far-off galaxies include small, dim structures that have never been observed before, including star clusters and hazy patterns, and Webb’s NIRCam has brought them into crisp focus. As Webb searches for the universe’s oldest galaxies, scientists will soon start to discover more about the galaxies’ masses, ages, histories, and compositions.
In the meanwhile, on Tuesday during a live broadcast, NASA will make the first full-colour photos and spectroscopic data from the James Webb Space Telescope available in collaboration with the European Space Agency (ESA) and the Canadian Space Agency (CSA). The three space agencies will release the photographs one at a time.
On December 25, 2021, the Webb telescope launched from Europe’s Spaceport in French Guiana on an Ariane 5 rocket to begin its quest to discover the mysteries of the cosmos. For an unobstructed view of the cosmos, the spaceship travelled for more than a month to get to its target about 15,00,000 kilometres from Earth.
