We have seen and heard about the cosmos, galaxies, and the universe, only in stories and movies. The actual image of the universe is beyond what we think or picturized it. We always imagine floating planets and millions of stars in zero gravity in space but we never get the chance to view the enchanting real image of the universe.
However, our view of the universe just expanded. The first image from NASA's new space telescope, which was presented on Monday, is bursting with galaxies and provides the most detailed view of the universe ever photographed.
The first view from the most powerful telescope ever sent into space, promises to transform our understanding of the universe's birth.
The light from several distinct flashing galaxies, among the earliest in the cosmos, has been photographed in great detail by the James Webb space telescope (JWST) in the narrow slice of the sky known as SMACS 0723. Joe Biden, who released the image at a White House event, described the occasion as "historic," adding that it opened "a fresh window into the history of our cosmos."
"It's difficult to comprehend," stated the US president. "It's incredible. It's a watershed moment for science and technology, for America, and mankind as a whole."
NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said the image shows galaxies' light twisting around other galaxies over billions of years before reaching the observatory. "We're looking back more than 13 billion years," he added, adding that further photographs to be released by NASA would go back even farther, to around 13.5 billion years, close to the estimated beginning of the universe itself. "We're practically back to the beginning," he explained.
The image is a preview of a sequence of high-resolution color images from JWST that will be unveiled by NASA on Tuesday. According to Nelson, they will comprise "the deepest image of our cosmos ever obtained."
According to experts, the telescope, which has been in the works for three decades and was launched last year, might transform our knowledge of the universe by delivering comprehensive infrared photographs of the universe.
The $10 billion telescopes can peer inside exoplanet atmospheres and study some of the universe's earliest galaxies by employing a series of lenses, filters, and prisms to detect signals in the infrared spectrum, which is invisible to the human eye. According to Marcia Rieke, professor of astronomy at the University of Arizona, the technology has "worked beautifully" thus far.
The telescope, a collaboration with the European Orbit Agency, has been under development since the mid-1990s and was launched into space in December. It is billed as the most powerful telescope ever sent into space and is now around 1 million kilometers from Earth, examining ancient galaxies.
