On 11th July 2022, NASA unveiled the images of what they call the deepest and sharpest infrared image of the distant universe with the help of the James Webb Telescope. The universe was photographed at its best resolution approximately 13 billion years ago. Built-in partnership with the European and Canadian Space Agencies for $10 billion, the tennis court-sized spacecraft that captured this shot was launched on December 25, 2021. It is the replacement for the Hubble Space Telescope. After completing a laborious six-month commissioning process it is prepared to take a journey through time.
What did James Webb telescope found?
According to Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, the cosmos is “giving up secrets that had been there for many, many decades, centuries, millennia” with the Webb observatory.
“It’s not an image. It’s a new worldview” he continued.
NASA administrator Bill Nelson said. The image, captured by the James Webb Space Telescope, the most powerful to be placed in orbit, covers a patch of the sky “roughly the size of a grain of sand held at arm’s length by someone standing on earth”. “We are looking back at more than 13 billion years. The light that you are seeing on one of these little specks has been traveling for 13 billion years,” he said. That makes it just 800 million years younger than the Big Bang, the theoretical flashpoint that set the expansion of the known universe in motion some 13.8 billion years ago.
The image displays the 4.6 billion-year-old galaxy cluster SMACS 0723, which acts as a gravitational lens to enlarge the much fainter and farther away objects behind it. On July 11, 2022, when the first image from NASA’s telescope was revealed, Joe Biden stated it was a momentous day because it provided a “new window into the history of our universe”.
The Possibilities
Infrared photos from the James Webb telescope, which took three decades to build and was finally deployed this year, are expected to alter our understanding of the cosmos. James Webb telescope uses a series of lenses, filters, and prisms to detect signals in the infrared spectrum, which are invisible to the human eye, in order to peer inside the atmospheres of exoplanets and study some of the oldest galaxies in the universe.
