James Webb Telescope Offers World's Deepest View | TechTree.com

James Webb Telescope Offers World's Deepest View

And scientists have been working on this for fourteen years to showcase a look at how our universe appeared in its early days

 

It took fourteen years of development and more than six months of calibration before the James Webb Space Telescope finally gave us a peek into the universe. The entire US leadership was present yesterday as NASA shared its first colored image from the space telescope that showed us a glimpse of how our universe looked in its infancy. 

According to NASA, this first image from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope is 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.

It represents the sharpest and deepest image of the distant universe to date. "What you see is a snapshot of a cluster of galaxies known as SMACS 0723 as they appeared 4.6 billion years ago. The combined mass of all the galaxies pictured acts as a gravitational lens, magnifying the much more distant celestial bodies seen in the background," NASA has said. 

The moment in history has long been in the making for NASA as when they first announced the James Webb Telescope project, the launch date was supposed to be in 2007. However, there was a redesign in 2005 and NASA took time till 2016 till the project work was completed with a launch date fixed for 2018. However, then came the pandemic and things just got harder on the testing and shipping front.  

At hand for the event today were President Joe Biden and his deputy Kamala Harris, as NASA further confirmed that Webb is now fully ready for scientific use with all its 17 ways of operating the telescope's instruments in working order and the spacecraft being fully commissioned. 


TAGS: NASA, Space, james webb

 
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