Before the highly anticipated release of the first deep-space photographs from the James Webb Telescope, a device so potent it can look back into the beginnings of the cosmos, next week, NASA has offered a tempting teaser image.
With an enormous primary mirror and infrared-focused instruments, the $10 billion observatories that were launched in December of last year and are currently orbiting the Sun a million miles (1.5 million kilometers) from Earth can see where no telescope has ever seen. This allows them to see through dust and gas.
The first finished images are scheduled to be released on July 12, but on Wednesday, NASA released an engineering test image that was created by combining 72 exposures taken over a period of 32 hours that shows a set of distant stars and galaxies.
According to NASA, the image is “among the deepest images of the universe ever taken,” despite some “rough-around-the-edges” characteristics, and it provides a “tantalizing glimpse” of what will be revealed in the upcoming weeks, months, and years.
Neil Rowlands, the program scientist for Honeywell Aerospace’s Webb’s Fine Guidance Sensor, remarked that “When this image was taken, I was thrilled to clearly see all the detailed structure in these faint galaxies,”
The “faintest blobs in this image are exactly the types of faint galaxies that Webb will study in its first year of science operations,” according to Jane Rigby, Webb’s operations scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.
Bill Nelson, the administrator of NASA, stated this week that Webb can look deeper into space than any telescope before it.
“It´s going to explore objects in the solar system and atmospheres of exoplanets orbiting other stars, giving us clues as to whether potentially their atmospheres are similar to our own,” he said.
“It may answer some questions that we have: Where do we come from? What more is out there? Who are we? And of course, it´s going to answer some questions that we don´t even know what the questions are.”
Webb can travel back in history to the Big Bang, which took place 13.8 billion years ago, because of its infrared capabilities.
The light from the first stars moves from the shorter ultraviolet and visible wavelengths it was generated into the longer infrared wavelengths that Webb is able to detect with an unmatched resolution as the Universe expands.
The earliest cosmic observations to yet have been made within 330 million years of the Big Bang, but scientists anticipate easily breaking this record given Webb’s capabilities.
To read our blog on “NASA is taking UFOs seriously, launching new research to investigate the phenomena,” click here.
