First image of the Webb telescope, the deepest of the Universe ever taken

July 12 () –

The first image of deep space from the James Webb Space Telescope was released this July 11 at a ceremony held at the White House by the President of the United States, Joe Biden.

This first observation, which is among the five announced last week, corresponds to the “deep field”, an image taken with a very long exposure time, to detect the faintest objects in the distance. Webb achieved this shot by pointing his main imager at SMACS 0723, a conglomeration of massive foreground galaxy clusters that magnify and distort light from objects behind them, allowing deep-field views of both populations of extremely distant galaxies as well as intrinsically faint ones. NASA Administrator Bill Nelson last month dubbed Webb’s now-released observation the “deepest image of our Universe ever taken” in the infrared. It reaches 13,000 million light years away, according to him he commented in the presentation before Biden.

NASA will release the rest of the first wave of images from the Webb telescope on Tuesday. They correspond to the Carina Nebula, the spectrum of the planet WASP-96b, the South Ring Nebula, and the compact group of galaxies called Stephan’s Quintet.

The Webb Space Telescope is an international mission led by NASA, ESA and the Canadian Space Agency. Launched on Christmas Day 2021 and finally placed 1.5 million kilometers from Earth, its 6.5-meter diameter main mirror promises much more precise observations than those of its predecessor, the Hubble telescope.