James Webb Telescope: Best images of the universe ever

NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has produced the deepest and sharpest infrared image of the distant universe to date.

Known as Webb’s First Deep Field, this image of galaxy cluster SMACS 0723 is overflowing with detail.

Written content from Rob Garner

Announcing James Webb Space Telescope 1st photos, news other than politics

Thousands of galaxies – including the faintest objects ever observed in the infrared – have appeared in Webb’s view for the first time. This slice of the vast universe covers a patch of sky approximately the size of a grain of sand held at arm’s length by someone on the ground.

This deep field, taken by Webb’s Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam), is a composite made from images at different wavelengths, totaling 12.5 hours – achieving depths at infrared wavelengths beyond the Hubble Space Telescope’s deepest fields, which took weeks.

The image shows the galaxy cluster SMACS 0723 as it appeared 4.6 billion years ago. The combined mass of this galaxy cluster acts as a gravitational lens, magnifying much more distant galaxies behind it. Webb’s NIRCam has brought those distant galaxies into sharp focus – they have tiny, faint structures that have never been seen before, including star clusters and diffuse features. Researchers will soon begin to learn more about the galaxies’ masses, ages, histories, and compositions, as Webb seeks the earliest galaxies in the universe.

This image is among the telescope’s first-full color images. The full suite will be released Tuesday, July 12, beginning at 10:30 a.m. EDT, during a live NASA TV broadcast. Learn more about how to watch.

The following written content by Elizabeth Howell from an earlier post

left of center: bright galaxy with 2 distinct rings of matter encircling a bright core. three bright foreground stars to the galaxy's left, upper right ,and far right — This NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope observation has captured the galaxy CGCG 396-2, an unusual multi-armed galaxy merger that lies around 520 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Orion

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James Webb Space Telescope 1st photos will include ‘deepest image of our universe’

Here’s a sneak peek at what to expect on July 12.

We finally have hints of what the first operational images will be from NASA’s deep-space observatory.

Among the first pictures coming in from the $10 billion James Webb Space Telescope will be “the deepest image of our universe that has ever been taken,” according to NASA administrator Bill Nelson.

While not specifying which early-universe objects Webb will focus upon, nor how old these targets are, Nelson suggested the image will show the earliest objects yet seen. “This is farther than humanity has ever looked before, and we’re only beginning to understand what Webb can and will do,” he added.

Webb’s new image may supersede the Hubble Space Telescope’s series of deep image fields showing galaxies in our universe formed as little as a few hundred million years after the Big Bang, which took place roughly 13.7 billion years ago.

Nelson was speaking at a media event at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, which manages Webb operations. NASA used the media event to discuss Webb’s forthcoming operational image release July 12 along with the range of science the observatory will conduct early in its tenure, including solar system objects, exoplanets, the early universe and a range of targets in between.

Another of the images coming that day will be Webb’s first spectrum of an exoplanet, according to Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator for NASA’s science mission directorate, who spoke at the same event. Such spectra, which measure the amount of light emitted at certain wavelengths, typically provide hints of a planet’s chemistry, which point to its formation history.

“We’ll look at these worlds out there that keep us awake at night, as we look into the starry sky and wonder … is there life elsewhere?” Zurbuchen said of the milestone. (Webb, however, is optimized to look at large gas giant planets and will likely not be able to get too much information from rocky worlds that might host life as we know it, based on past information from the consortium.)

NASA’s first science-quality images from the observatory will be released July 12 at 10:30 a.m. EDT (1430 GMT) and will be webcast live here at Space.com along with NASA’s website and social media channels. (Certain Webb partners have also committed to events or webcasts, like the Canadian Space Agency.) Read more from Space.