- President Joe Biden unveiled this image of galaxy
cluster SMACS 0723, known as Webb’s First Deep Field, during a White House
event Monday, July 11
- Webb’s image covers a patch of sky approximately
the size of a grain of sand held at arm’s length by someone on the ground
– and reveals thousands of galaxies in a tiny sliver of vast universe
- Webb’s sharp near-infrared view brought out faint
structures in extremely distant galaxies, offering the most detailed view
of the early universe to date
- NASA and its partners will release the full
series of Webb’s first full-color images and data, known as spectra,
Tuesday, July 12, during a live NASA TV broadcast
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.
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.
Image credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, and STScI
The James Webb Space Telescope is the world's premier space science
observatory. Webb will solve mysteries in our solar system, look beyond to
distant worlds around other stars, and probe the mysterious structures and
origins of our universe and our place in it. Webb is an international program
led by NASA with its partners, ESA (European Space Agency) and CSA (Canadian
Space Agency).
NASA Headquarters oversees the mission for the agency’s Science Mission
Directorate. NASA’s Goddard Space
Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, manages Webb
for the agency and oversees work on the mission performed by the Space
Telescope Science Institute, Northrop Grumman, and other mission partners. In
addition to Goddard, several NASA centers contributed to the project, including
the agency’s Johnson Space Center in Houston; Jet Propulsion Laboratory
(JPL) in Southern California; Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville,
Alabama; Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley; and others.
NIRCam was built by a team at the University of Arizona and Lockheed
Martin’s Advanced Technology Center.
Download full-resolution, uncompressed versions at https://webbtelescope.org/news/first-images.
Source: NASA’s
Webb Delivers Deepest Infrared Image of Universe Yet | NASA
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