On Monday, July 11, President Joe Biden unveiled one
of the James Webb Space Telescope’s first images in a preview event at the
White House in Washington. The deepest and sharpest infrared image of the
far-off universe up to date has been produced. Known as Webb’s First Deep
Field, the image is of the galaxy cluster SMACS 0723, which is overflowing with
minute details.
It has happened for the first time that the faintest
objects have been observed in the infrared, besides thousands of galaxies. The
images capture a slice of the vast universe by covering the patch of the sky almost
approximately the size of a grain of sand held at arm’s length by a person on the
ground.
This deep field image, taken by Webb’s Near-Infrared
Camera (NIRCam), is a composite made from the images taken from different
wavelengths, which is approximately totaling 12.5 hours – achieving insightful depths
at infrared wavelengths beyond the Hubble Space Telescope’s deepest fields,
which took weeks.
The image unveiled shows the galaxy SMACS 0723
exactly the way how it appeared 4.6 billion years ago. A galaxy cluster whose
mass combined altogether acts as a gravitational lens, which magnifies much
more galaxies behind it. Webb’s NIRCam has provided the image of distant galaxies
in the form of sharp focus - they have tiny, faint structures that have never
been seen before, including the star clusters and diffuse features.
James
Webb Space Telescope & its Importance?
The telescope worth $10bn is the world’s premier
space science observatory. It was launched on December, 25th last
year as the successor to the prominent Hubble Space Telescope. Webb is designed
to solve the mystery in our solar system, to look far beyond the distant worlds
around the other stars, and to get the details of other mysterious structures,
besides getting us the details of our universe’s origin and our place in it.
Webb Space is an international program spearheaded by NASA in joint collaboration
with ESA, European Space Agency, and CSA, Canadian Space Agency.
The purpose with which it has been designed is to
make all sorts of observations in the sky, but two of the biggest approach of
this telescope are, To take pictures of the very first stars to shine in the
Universe more than 13.5 billion years ago and the other one is to find out
whether the far-off planets are habitable or not?
NIRCam, one of the most crucial components of the
telescope was built by a team at the University of Arizona and Lockheed Marin’s
Advanced Technology Centre.
The image that is out officially from NASA is among
the telescope’s first-full color images. The full suite of it will be released
on July 12th, Tuesday, beginning at 10.30 a.m. EDT, during a live NASA TV
broadcast.