First image from Nasa’s James Webb Space Telescope offers deepest-ever look at cosmos
- The US$10 billion device has helped humanity see further an ever into time and space – close to the edge of the universe
- The image unveiled at the White House will be followed on Tuesday by the release of four more galactic beauty shots from the giant space telescope
Our view of the universe just expanded: the first image from Nasa’s new space telescope unveiled on Monday is brimming with galaxies and offers the deepest look of the cosmos ever captured.
The first image from the US$10 billion James Webb Space Telescope is the farthest humanity has ever seen in both time and distance, closer to the dawn of time and the edge of the universe. That image will be followed on Tuesday by the release of four more galactic beauty shots from the telescope’s initial outward gazes.
The “deep field” image released at a White House event is filled with lots of stars, with massive galaxies in the foreground and faint and extremely distant galaxies peeking through here and there. Part of the image is light from not too long after the Big Bang, which was 13.8 billion years ago.
“We’re going to give humanity a new view of the cosmos,” Nasa Administrator Bill Nelson told reporters last month in a briefing. “And it’s a view that we’ve never seen before.”
The images on tap for Tuesday include a view of a giant gaseous planet outside our solar system, two images of a nebula where stars are born and die in spectacular beauty and an update of a classic image of five tightly clustered galaxies that dance around each other.