The White House’s sneaky peek at the first high-resolution, color image of the Webb came on the eve of a larger unveiling of photos and spectrographic data that NASA plans to present at the Goddard Space Flight Center on Tuesday. in suburban Maryland.
The $9 billion Webb Observatory, the largest and most powerful space science telescope ever launched, was designed to peer into the cosmos until the dawn of the known universe, ushering in a revolutionary revolution of astronomical discoveries.
The image presented by Biden and NASA chief Bill Nelson showed the 4.6 billion-year-old cluster of galaxies named SMACS 0723, whose combined mass acts as a “gravitational lens”, distorting space to greatly amplify the light coming from more distant galaxies behind it.
At least one of the older specks of light appearing in the “background” of the photo – a composite of images of different wavelengths of light – is over 13 billion years old, Nelson said. . This makes it a mere 800 million years younger than the Big Bang, the theoretical flashpoint that triggered the expansion of the known universe some 13.8 billion years ago.
“It’s a new window into the history of our universe,” Biden said before the image was unveiled. “And today we’re going to get a glimpse of the first light shining through that window: light from other worlds, orbiting stars far beyond our own. It’s amazing to me.”
He was joined in the Old Executive Office Building of the White House complex by Vice President Kamala Harris, who chairs the National Space Council of the United States.
FROM GRAIN OF SAND TO SKY
On Friday, the space agency released a list of five key topics chosen for Webb’s presentation. Among them is SMACS 0723, a sliver of outer space that NASA says offers “the most detailed view of the early universe yet.” It is also the deepest and sharpest infrared image of the distant cosmos ever taken.
The thousands of galaxies were captured in a tiny patch of sky roughly the size of a grain of sand held at arm’s length by a person standing on Earth, Nelson said.
Webb was built under contract by aerospace giant Northrop Grumman Corp. It was launched into space for NASA and its European and Canadian counterparts on Christmas Day 2021 from French Guiana, on the northeast coast of South America.
The highly anticipated release of its first images follows six months of remote deployment of Webb’s various components, alignment of its mirrors and calibration of instruments.
With Webb now finely tuned and fully focused, scientists will embark on a competitively selected slate of missions to explore the evolution of galaxies, the life cycles of stars, the atmospheres of distant exoplants and the moons of our solar system. external.
Built to observe its subjects primarily in the infrared spectrum, Webb is about 100 times more sensitive than its 30-year-old predecessor, the Hubble Space Telescope, which operates primarily in optical and ultraviolet wavelengths.
The much larger light-gathering surface of Webb’s primary mirror—an array of 18 hexagonal segments of gold-coated bryllium metal—allows it to observe objects from greater distances, and therefore further back in time, than Hubble or any other telescope.
Webb’s five introductory targets were already known to scientists. Among them are two huge clouds of gas and dust blasted into space by stellar explosions to form incubators for new stars – the Carina Nebula and the Southern Ring Nebula, each thousands of years old. -Earth light.
The collection also includes a cluster of galaxies known as Stephan’s Quintet, which was first discovered in 1877 and encompasses several galaxies described by NASA as “locked in a cosmic dance of repeated close encounters.”
NASA will also present Webb’s first spectrographic analysis of an exoplant – a planet about half the mass of Jupiter that lies more than 1,100 light-years away – revealing the molecular signatures of filtered light passing through its atmosphere.