Ancient space wallpaper series#

Nasa said JWST has five initial cosmic targets for observation, including the Carina nebula, a sort of celestial nursery where stars form. The telescope should be considered “one of humanity’s great engineering achievements”, said Kamala Harris, the US vice-president. The initial goal of the project was to see the first stars and galaxies formed following the big bang, watching “the universe turn the lights on for the first time”, as Eric Smith, Webb program scientist, put it. It is described as the most powerful telescope ever to be sent into space and is currently about 1m miles from Earth, performing its task of scanning ancient galaxies. The telescope, which is a joint endeavor with the European Space Agency and Canadian Space Agency, has been in development since the mid-1990s and was finally propelled into space in December. “Webb is bigger than Hubble so that it can see fainter galaxies that are further away.” “Webb can see backwards in time just after the big bang by looking for galaxies that are so far away, the light has taken many billions of years to get from those galaxies to ourselves,” said Jonathan Gardner, deputy senior project scientist at Nasa, during a recent news conference. The system has so far “performed flawlessly”, according to Marcia Rieke, professor of astronomy at University of Arizona. The $10bn telescope is able to peek inside the atmospheres of exoplanets and observe some of the oldest galaxies in the universe by using a system of lenses, filters and prisms to detect signals in the infrared spectrum, which is invisible to the human eye. Technicians lift the mirror of the James Webb space telescope in 2017.

They will include “the deepest image of our universe that has ever been taken”, according to Nelson.Įxperts have said the telescope, three decades in the making and launched last year, could revolutionize our understanding of the cosmos by providing detailed infrared images of the universe.

Ancient space wallpaper series#

The release of the image is a preview of a series of high-resolution color pictures from JWST that will be shown off by Nasa on Tuesday. “We are going back almost to the beginning,” he said. “We are looking back more than 13 billion years,” he said, adding that more images to be released by the space agency would reach back further, to about 13.5 billion years, close to the estimated start point of the universe itself. Slide to compare the two images.īill Nelson, administrator of Nasa, said the image showed the light of galaxies bending around other galaxies, traveling for billions of years before reaching the telescope. The first full-colour image from Nasa’s James Webb space telescope shows the galaxy cluster SMACS 0723 compared to the older Hubble Image The first full-colour image from Nasa’s James Webb space telescope of galaxy cluster SMACS 0723 compared to the older Hubble Image.