The deepest infrared view of the Universe ever was just unveiled, and it’s even better than we could have imagined.
In a NASA livestream, US President Joe Biden released the first official image from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), showing us an unprecedented new image of a region of space known as SMACS 0723 – a deep field into the distant Universe.
It’s the furthest back in time we’ve peered in the Universe to date, thanks to JWST’s impressive infrared capabilities and its giant mirror.
“For the first time, we can see the details of these earliest galaxies, harbouring the first generations of stars to have ever formed in the Universe. These galaxies formed in a mostly dark universe, filled with neutral hydrogen gas, and very different to the cosmos we see today,” astronomer Cathryn Trott from the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research, who wasn’t involved in the research
This image captures the starlight from the earliest objects to have formed in the first few hundred million years after the Big Bang. This starlight is more than 13 billion years old, focussed toward JWST by the incredible bending power of a massive cluster of younger galaxies(Science alert)