NASA delivers deepest image of galaxies as it appeared 4.6 billion years ago

Tribune News Service

Aditi Tandon

New Delhi, July 12

The deepest, sharpest infrared image of the distant universe to date is now out there for the world to see and savour.

NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, the world’s premier space science observatory set up to solve mysteries of the solar system, has produced this image, released by US President Joe Biden late on Monday.

Known as Webb’s First Deep Field, the image of galaxy cluster SMACS 0723 is overflowing with detail and shows the galaxy cluster as it appeared 4.6 billion years ago.

“Thousands of galaxies – including the faintest objects ever observed in the infrared – have appeared in Webb’s view for the first time. This slice of the vast universe covers a patch of sky approximately the size of a grain of sand held at arm’s length by someone on the ground. This deep field, taken by Webb’s Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam), is a composite made from images at different wavelengths, totaling 12.5 hours – achieving depths at infrared wavelengths beyond the Hubble Space Telescope’s deepest fields, which took weeks,” the NASA said on Tuesday.

The image shows as it appeared 4.6 billion years ago. The combined mass of the galaxy cluster SMACS 0723 acts as a gravitational lens, magnifying much more distant galaxies behind it.

Webb’s NIRCam has brought those distant galaxies into sharp focus – they have tiny, faint structures that have never been seen before, including star clusters and diffuse features.

“Researchers will soon begin to learn more about the galaxies’ masses, ages, histories, and compositions, as Webb seeks the earliest galaxies in the universe. This image is among the telescope’s first-full color images,” the NASA said.

On Monday, President Biden released one of the James Webb Space Telescope’s first images in a preview event at the White House in Washington.

NASA, in partnership with ESA (European Space Agency) and CSA (Canadian Space Agency), will release the full set of Webb’s first full-color images and spectroscopic data during a televised broadcast beginning at 10:30 AM EDT (14:30 UTC) on Tuesday from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.

The James Webb Space Telescope is the world’s premier space science observatory.

Webb was set up to solve mysteries in the solar system, look beyond to distant worlds around other stars, and probe the mysterious structures and origins of our universe and our place in it. Webb is an international program led by NASA with its partners, ESA (European Space Agency) and CSA (Canadian Space Agency).

 NASA Headquarters oversees the mission for the agency’s Science Mission Directorate.

NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, manages Webb for the agency and oversees work on the mission performed by the Space Telescope Science Institute, Northrop Grumman, and other mission partners.

In addition to Goddard, several NASA centers contributed to the project, including the agency’s Johnson Space Center in Houston; Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Southern California; Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama; Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley; and others.

NIRCam was built by a team at the University of Arizona and Lockheed Martin’s Advanced Technology Center.

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