Images of Distant Galaxies Captured by NASA’s Webb Telescope
James Webb Space Telescope | NASA
This week, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) released the first full-color images from its newest space telescope: the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). Astronomers expect the JWST will fill in a mysterious gap in our knowledge about the first 400 million years after the Big Bang as well as provide clues to the existence of life forms elsewhere in the universe.
President Joe Biden unveiled the first image from the JWST at a White House event on Monday.
“These images are going to remind the world that America can do big things and remind the American people – especially our children – that there’s nothing beyond our capacity,” said President Biden.
With the JWST, NASA has a space observatory six times larger and 100 times more powerful than Hubble—the agency’s main space observatory since 1990. The JWST was built and launched over two decades and cost $10 billion. Now that it's fully unfolded and calibrated, the telescope orbits the sun 1 million miles from Earth.
“It maintains our ability to propel us forward for science, for risk-taking, for inspiration,” stated Bill Nelson, the NASA Administrator. “We don't want to ever stop exploring the heavens or stop daring to take another step forward for humanity.”
The images revealed this week include the following:
Carina Nebula—one of the largest and brightest nebulae (a region where stars form) in the sky—located approximately 7,600 light-years away and is populated by massive stars several times larger than the sun;
The planetary nebula Southern Ring is an expanding cloud of gas, surrounding a dying star. About 2,000 light-years from Earth, it measures nearly half a light-year in diameter.
Stephan's Quintet was the first compact galaxy group ever discovered in 1877 and is about 290 million light-years away located in the constellation Pegasus. Four of the five galaxies within the quintet are engaged in a slow process of destruction due to repeated close encounters that will last for billions of years
Foreground galaxy cluster SMACS 0723 magnifies and distorts the light of objects behind it, providing a deep field view of both extremely distant and intrinsically faint galaxies.
To view the images, click here. For more about telescope’s status, visit the Webb tracker.
