NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said the image shows galaxies’ light twisting around other galaxies over billions of years before reaching the observatory. “We’re looking back more than 13 billion years,” he added, adding that further photographs to be released by NASA would go back even farther, to around 13.5 billion years, close to the estimated beginning of the universe itself. “We’re practically back to the beginning,” he explained.
The image is a preview of a sequence of high-resolution color images from JWST that will be unveiled by NASA on Tuesday. According to Nelson, they will comprise “the deepest image of our cosmos ever obtained.”
According to experts, the telescope, which has been in the works for three decades and was launched last year, might transform our knowledge of the universe by delivering comprehensive infrared photographs of the universe.
The $10 billion telescopes can peer inside exoplanet atmospheres
The $10 billion telescopes can peer inside exoplanet atmospheres and study some of the universe’s earliest galaxies by employing a series of lenses, filters, and prisms to detect signals in the infrared spectrum, which is invisible to the human eye. According to Marcia Rieke, professor of astronomy at the University of Arizona, the technology has “worked beautifully” thus far.
The telescope, a collaboration with the European Orbit Agency, has been under development since the mid-1990s and was launched into space in December. It is billed as the most powerful telescope ever sent into space and is now around 1 million kilometers from Earth, examining ancient galaxies.