INCREDIBLE GLIMPSE INTO SPACE: NASA Unveils First Image from James Webb Space Telescope

NASA’s revolutionary, long-delayed $10 billion James Webb Space Telescope has produced its first full-color image, and it’s a doozy: a glimpse deep into space and back in time, capturing the faint light of galaxies forming in the infancy of the cosmos.

The image, revealed Monday in a White House ceremony by President Joe Biden and top NASA officials, shows a cluster of galaxies, called SMACS 0723, that functions as a massive lens, magnifying the extremely faint and cosmically distant objects behind it.

The new image is what is known as a “deep field” observation, with the telescope staring at what NASA called a “patch of sky approximately the size of a grain of sand held at arm’s length by someone on the ground.”

Outer space when viewed like this looks incredibly crowded – not so very spacious at all. What the Webb sees through this pinhole examination of the cosmic darkness is a hornet’s nest of brilliant but enigmatic objects in many colors. A smattering of stars have parked themselves in the foreground, but everything else is a galaxy – a vast agglomeration of stars, rendered into a small splash of light by the immense distances involved.

Strikingly, the lensing effect has distorted some of the distant galaxies in the background, making them appear stretched and manipulated, as if made of Play-Doh.

“It’s astounding,” Biden said, expressing awe at the sight of “the oldest documented light in the history of the universe…”

The White House described the image as the “highest-resolution images of the infrared universe ever captured.” The Webb is designed to observe in the infrared portion of the electromagnetic spectrum, gathering light at wavelengths inaccessible to the acclaimed Hubble telescope.

The White House event was a preview of a more comprehensive reveal of images during a news conference scheduled for today at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.

NASA and its partners, the European Space Agency and the Canadian Space Agency, have been keeping a close hold on the first Webb images during the initial sequence of observations as the telescope, launched last December, orbits the sun roughly a million miles from Earth. NASA has previously released a few testing-phase images of the telescope – thrilling astronomers with their clarity – but has described the images being released Monday and Tuesday as the first full-color images.

The astronomical community is buzzing with excitement, awaiting what it believes will be revolutionary views of the universe across cosmic distances and with unrivaled resolution. The Webb promises to study planets that orbit distant stars, looking for signs of possible habitability – such as the presence of an atmosphere similar to Earth’s.

“You’re going to see whether or not planets, because of the chemical composition that we can determine with this telescope, of their atmosphere, if those planets are habitable,” Nelson said.

The telescope – conceived as the successor to the still-operational Hubble – “has capabilities that far surpass my most optimistic dreams,” Garth Illingworth, an astronomer at the University of California at Santa Cruz who in the late 1980s was instrumental in developing plans for an infrared space telescope, wrote in an email to fellow astronomers Monday. “The capabilities of Webb are truly out of this world.”

The initial deep look into the universe by the Webb is just a taste of what is to come, said planetary astronomer Heidi Hammel, who is among the scientists scheduled to use the Webb in coming months. Hammel described the initial deep look unveiled Monday as “proof of concept . . . whetting our appetite for the record-breaking results we now know will come from this exceptional facility.”

Regardless of whatever wow factor is generated by the new images, the significant fact is that the Webb works. This was never a slam-dunk mission. The telescope was repeatedly delayed, and its price tag soared. At one point, Congress nearly killed the project. For many years, it was unclear whether the Webb would get off the ground, literally.

The ambitious scientific goals set out by NASA and its partners required a revolutionary design. The scientists who in the 1980s began advocating what was originally called the Next Generation Space Telescope argued that an infrared space observatory would be able to peer deeper into the universe – and further back in time, to an era roughly a few hundred million years after the big bang. That’s when the first stars ignited and starlight flooded the young universe.

The telescope – or the “observatory,” as scientists often call it – features 18 gold-plated, hexagonal, individually maneuverable mirrors that function like a single mirror about 21 feet across. This giant light bucket is not inside a protective tube but rather is open to the universe like a flower.

The mirrors, cameras and other instruments that need to be kept ultracold for infrared astronomy are protected from the sun’s radiation by a five-layered, tennis-court-sized sun shield. The sun shield and many other components, including the mirrors, were folded up at launch and had to be deployed during the telescope’s nearly month-long journey to its orbital post.

One report found 344 separate things that could go wrong – “single point failures” – and potentially derail the entire project. The telescope is not designed to be fixed if something goes seriously awry. The instruments are not modular and cannot be swapped out if they break. Unlike the Hubble, the Webb is too far away to be visited by astronauts.

But none of those single point failures happened. The Webb has surpassed astronomer’s scientific expectations, despite getting dinged recently by a micrometeoroid that put one of the mirror segments slightly out of whack.

“This telescope is one of humanity’s great engineering achievements,” Vice President Kamala Harris said Monday at the unveiling.

The Webb will study the formation of the earliest galaxies and the evolution of the universe as it has expanded. And it will look at objects that are in our own solar system, including small, icy worlds beyond the orbit of Neptune.

NASA on Friday identified the five initial “targets” of the Webb:

– Wasp-96 b: This is a giant planet, maybe half the size of Jupiter, that circles a star 1,150 light-years from Earth. The planet is too close to the brilliant star to be resolved as an individual object, but an instrument on the telescope has obtained the spectra of the planet, a scientifically important feat because it can reveal the composition of the planet’s atmosphere.

– Southern Ring Nebula: Located about 2,000 light-years away, the nebula is a gas cloud surrounding a dying star.

– Carina Nebula: The nebula is packed with stars, including the ultraluminous star system Eta Carinae. Situated roughly 7,500 light-years from Earth, within our own Milky Way galaxy, the nebula is visible from the Southern Hemisphere.

– Stephan’s Quintet: Five beguiling galaxies, four of them in a cluster about 290 million light-years away, in the constellation Pegasus. The quintet has been previously observed by the Hubble, and the new image will allow a side-by-side comparison of what the two space telescopes see as they gather light in different wavelengths.

– SMACS 0723: The deepest look. The galaxies in the cluster operate as a gravitational lens and, according to NASA, “magnify and distort the light of objects behind them, permitting a deep field view into both the extremely distant and intrinsically faint galaxy populations.”

(c) 2022, The Washington Post · Joel Achenbach