President of the United States Joe Biden released a breathtaking picture captured by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope. Looking back more than 13 billion years, the powerful telescope has produced the ‘deepest and sharpest infrared image of the early universe’ ever taken.
The image contains the faintest objects ever seen, along with thousands of galaxies. According to NASA Administrator Bill Nelson, one of the older, fainter specks of light visible in the ‘background’ of the image, which is a composite of photographs of various light wavelengths, dates back more than 13 billion years.
The stunning image showed the 4.6 billion-year-old galaxy cluster named SMACS 0723, whose combined mass acts as a ‘gravitational lens,’ distorting space to greatly magnify the light coming from more distant galaxies behind it.
The head of NASA went on to say that a little region of the sky, about the size of a grain of sand thrown out at arm’s length from Earth, contained thousands of galaxies.
The James Webb Space Telescope: What Is It?
It is the most potent observatory ever launched into orbit, the James Webb Space Telescope.
Astronomer Dan Coe, a specialist in the early Universe at the Space Telescope Science Institute (STSI), stated to the news agency AFP: ‘I instantly discovered three facts about the universe that I had never known before when I first saw the photographs. It completely blew my head.’
James Webb Space Telescope is very unique. Its infrared capabilities are what make it powerful, allowing it to both pierce through cosmic dust clouds and detect light from the earliest stars, which has been stretched into infrared wavelengths as the universe expanded.
With that, James Webb can peer further back in time than any previous telescope, to the period shortly after the Big Bang, 13.8 billion years ago.
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