NASA reveals James Webb Space Telescope’s first images of cosmos
The first pictures from NASA’s James Webb Telescope have been made public. They are the deepest images of the Universe ever made.
Full-color images from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope were released on Tuesday, providing a glimpse of what the early Universe looked like.
The images are some of the most detailed pictures of the Cosmos ever captured.
They provide views of five targets: galaxy cluster SMACS 0723, the gas planet WASP-96 b, the Southern Ring Nebula, the Stephan’s Quintent galaxy group and the Carina Nebula.
A teaser image, released Monday, showed the galaxy cluster SMACS 0723 as it appeared 4.6 billion years ago, NASA said in a press release. The combined mass of the galaxy cluster acts as a gravitational lense and magnifies much more distant galaxies behind it.
“If you held a grain of sand on the tip of your finger at arm’s length, that is the part of the universe you’re seeing [in this image]. Here, you’re seeing galaxies shining around other galaxies whose light has been bent,” said NASA Administrator Bill Nelson.
Webb also showed five galaxies in Stephan’s Quintent. Each galaxy contains millions or hundreds of millions of stars. These galaxies are about 300 million light-years away from us, locked in a cosmic dance, help together by gravitational forces.
This image shows the evolution of the different galaxies. This image shows the process of stars being born and evolving.
About 290 million light-years away, Stephan’s Quintet is located in the constellation Pegasus. It is notable for being the first compact galaxy group ever discovered in 1877. Four of the five galaxies within the quintet are locked in a cosmic dance of repeated close encounters.
The final image revealed from Webb showed the cosmic cliffs in the Carina Nebula, with hundreds of new stars we have never seen before.
Massive foreground galaxy clusters magnify and distort the light of objects behind them, permitting a deep field view into both the extremely distant and intrinsically faint galaxy populations.
The image shows the cliffs of gas and dust, which are the building blocks of stars and planets. But there is also a flip side, as the same process can erode the materials to stop star formation.