Time travel: NASA reveals most distant galaxies ever seen

The first image from the $10 billion James Webb Space Telescope shows humanity’s farthest ever observed in both time and distance, approaching the dawn of time and the edge of the universe. That image will be followed by the release of four more Galactic Beauty shots from the telescope’s opening outer gauge Tuesday.

The “deep field” image released during a brief White House event shows lots of stars, giant galaxies in the foreground and faint and extremely distant galaxies peeking around. Part of the image is light that is not too late since the Big Bang, which was 13.8 billion years ago.

President Joe Biden expressed surprise at the image he said “shows the oldest documented light in the history of the universe at over 13 billion—I say again—13 billion years ago. Hard to fathom.”

NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said the busy image is only “a tiny particle of the universe,” with hundreds of spots, stripes, spirals and swirls of white, yellow, orange and red.

“What we saw today is the early universe,” Harvard astronomer Dimitar Sasselov said in a phone interview after the reveal.

Sasselov said he and his colleague Charles Alcock previously thought “we’ve seen it before.” He then took a closer look at the image and declared the result not only beautiful but “worth all the wait” for a much-delayed project.

More coming on Tuesday. Pictures on tap include a view of a giant gaseous planet outside our solar system, two images of a nebula where stars are born and die in spectacular beauty and five tightly clustered ones dancing around each other. An update of a classic image of the galaxies is included.

The world’s largest and most powerful space telescope took off from French Guiana in South America last December. It reached its lookout point 1 million miles (1.6 million kilometers) from Earth in January. Then the lengthy process began to align the mirrors, cooling the infrared detectors enough to operate and calibrate the science instruments, all protected by a sunshade the size of a tennis court that kept the telescope cool.

The plan is to use the telescope far enough away that scientists can get a glimpse of the early days of the universe, some 13.7 billion years ago, and close cosmic objects, even our own solar system, with sharp focus. Can be zoomed in with.

How far did that first image look from 13 billion years ago? NASA did not provide any estimates on Monday. Outside scientists said those calculations will take time, but they are fairly certain that somewhere in the inverse image is a galaxy older than humanity, perhaps 500 million or 600 million years after the Big Bang.

“It takes a while to dig up those galaxies. These are things you almost can’t see here, the tiniest little red dots,” said University of California, Santa Cruz, astrophysicist Garth Illingworth.

“It’s absolutely fantastic, absolutely amazing,” he said. “It’s everything we’ve dreamed of in a telescope like this.”

Webb is considered the successor to the highly successful, but aging Hubble Space Telescope. Hubble dates back to 13.4 billion years ago. It found the light wave signature of an extremely bright galaxy in 2016. Astronomers measure how far they see in light-years, with a light-year being 5.8 trillion miles (9.3 trillion kilometers).

“Webb can look back in time since the Big Bang in looking for galaxies so distant that it took many billions of years for light to reach our telescopes from those galaxies,” said Jonathan Gardner, Webb’s deputy project scientist. During a June media briefing.

The deepest view of the universe “is not a record that will stand for very long,” project scientist Klaus Pontopidan said during the briefing, as scientists are expected to use the Webb telescope to go even deeper .

At 21 feet (6.4 m), Webb’s gold-plated, flower-shaped mirror is the largest and most sensitive mirror ever sent into space. It consists of 18 volumes, one of which was smacked in May by a larger than anticipated micrometer. The last four micrometeoroid strikes on the mirror were small. Despite the impacts, the telescope has continued to exceed mission requirements, with barely any data loss, according to NASA.

NASA is collaborating with European and Canadian space agencies on Webb.

Richard Ellis, professor of astrophysics at the university, said, “I’m really excited now because this dramatic progress bodes well for many astronomers like me to reach the ultimate prize: pinpointing “cosmic dawn” – the moment when The universe was bathed in starlight for the first time.” College London, said by email.

AP Aerospace writer Marcia Dunn contributed to the story.

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