UNITED STATES — On Monday, NASA shared with the world its first picture from the James Webb Space Telescope, delivering the deepest and sharpest infrared image of the distant universe to date.
“We’ve never seen this type of detail before in galaxies that are on the other side of the visible universe,” said Samuel Singer, Wyoming Stargazing’s executive director.
To better understand just how sharp these images are, Singer says to think of it as the difference between seeing someone’s face from 100 feet away as opposed to standing a foot away with a magnifying glass.
The scale of the images is pretty astonishing too.
“This image covers the area of a part of the sky that you could cover up with a grain of sand held at arm’s length while standing on the surface of the earth.”
Samuel Singer, Wyoming Stargazing
Previously, the Hubble Space Telescope had captured these galaxies but never with such detail as the Webb.
“It is unprecedented,” he says.
Singer explains that imaging as such is a new opportunity to learn about how these galaxies first formed, one of the principal objectives of the Webb Telescope. By imaging these galaxies in greater detail, astronomers can learn more about how these early galaxies were forming some billions of years ago.
And when it comes to talking galaxies, time is pretty unfathomable.
When folks on earth see these galaxies this far away, they are looking that far back in time, reminded Singer.
“So we’re seeing them as they existed 10 to 12 billion years ago.”
Even more incredible is the fact that the Webb Telescope captured this image in just over 12 hours. In order to get a comparable image from the Hubble telescope, it would take 12 days.
Singer explained that when capturing these images, NASA sends commands to the Webb Telescope, located 1 million miles away or 4 times the distance to the moon.
“The telescope is just hanging out in this gravitationally balanced spot called the L2 (Lagrange point), this area that is perfectly balanced with respect to the earth-moon sun system.”
As it sits there, researchers will continue to use Webb to take longer exposures, revealing more of the vast universe and pushing the envelope further in the realm of space exploration.
Read further about the Webb Telescope and its images here.
