On Monday, July 11, President Joe Biden unveiled oneof the James Webb Space Telescope’s first images in a preview event at theWhite House in Washington. The deepest and sharpest infrared image of thefar-off universe up to date has been produced. Known as Webb’s First DeepField, the image is of the galaxy cluster SMACS 0723, which is overflowing withminute details.
It has happened for the first time that the faintestobjects have been observed in the infrared, besides thousands of galaxies. Theimages capture a slice of the vast universe by covering the patch of the sky almostapproximately the size of a grain of sand held at arm’s length by a person on theground.
This deep field image, taken by Webb’s Near-InfraredCamera (NIRCam), is a composite made from the images taken from differentwavelengths, which is approximately totaling 12.5 hours – achieving insightful depthsat infrared wavelengths beyond the Hubble Space Telescope’s deepest fields,which took weeks.
The image unveiled shows the galaxy SMACS 0723exactly the way how it appeared 4.6 billion years ago. A galaxy cluster whosemass combined altogether acts as a gravitational lens, which magnifies muchmore galaxies behind it. Webb’s NIRCam has provided the image of distant galaxiesin the form of sharp focus - they have tiny, faint structures that have neverbeen seen before, including the star clusters and diffuse features.
JamesWebb Space Telescope & its Importance?
The telescope worth $10bn is the world’s premierspace science observatory. It was launched on December, 25th lastyear as the successor to the prominent Hubble Space Telescope. Webb is designedto solve the mystery in our solar system, to look far beyond the distant worldsaround 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 collaborationwith ESA, European Space Agency, and CSA, Canadian Space Agency.
The purpose with which it has been designed is tomake all sorts of observations in the sky, but two of the biggest approach ofthis telescope are, To take pictures of the very first stars to shine in theUniverse more than 13.5 billion years ago and the other one is to find outwhether the far-off planets are habitable or not?
NIRCam, one of the most crucial components of thetelescope was built by a team at the University of Arizona and Lockheed Marin’sAdvanced Technology Centre.
The image that is out officially from NASA is amongthe telescope’s first-full color images. The full suite of it will be releasedon July 12th, Tuesday, beginning at 10.30 a.m. EDT, during a live NASA TVbroadcast.