(ORDO NEWS) — NASA has released a teasing teaser ahead of the long-awaited release next week of the first images of deep space from the James Webb Telescope, an instrument so powerful it can peer back to the origins of the universe.
The $10 billion observatory, launched last December and currently orbiting the sun at a distance of a million miles (1.5 million kilometers) from Earth, can see where no telescope has seen before thanks to its huge primary mirror. and instruments that focus on the infrared spectrum, allowing him to see through dust and gas.
The first fully formed images are due July 12, but on Wednesday NASA released an engineering test photo of 72 exposures in 32 hours, showing a collection of distant stars and galaxies.
The image has some “roughness” qualities, NASA said in a statement, but it is still “one of the deepest images of the universe.” ever made” and offers a “teasing glimpse” of what’s to come in the weeks, months and years to come.
“When this image was taken, I was thrilled to see all the detailed structure in these dim galaxies,” said Neil Rowlands, software scientist at Honeywell Aerospace’s Webb’s Fine Guidance Sensor.
Jane Rigby, Webb Research Fellow at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, said “the faintest spots in this image are exactly the types of faint galaxies that Webb will be studying in his first year of science. ”
NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said last week that Webb can look deeper into space than any other telescope before him.
“It will explore objects in the solar system and the atmospheres of exoplanets orbiting other stars, which will give us clues as to whether their atmospheres are potentially similar to ours,” he said. said.
“It might answer some of the questions we have: Where do we come from? What else do you have? Who are we? And, of course, he will answer some questions that we don’t even know about.”
Webb’s infrared capabilities allow it to look back in time to the Big Bang, which happened 13.8 billion years ago. back.
As the universe expands, light from the earliest stars shifts from the ultraviolet and visible wavelengths in which it was emitted to longer infrared wavelengths that Webb can detect with unprecedented resolution.
Currently, the earliest cosmological observations date back to 330 million years after the Big Bang, but astronomers believe that thanks to Webb’s capabilities, they will easily break the record.
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