James Webb Space Telescope reveals its first stunning images
NASA released the first full-colour pictures from the most powerful space observatory ever built, showing the early universe in unprecedented detail.
NASA unveiled the first full-colour images from the James Webb Space Telescope on Tuesday, offering a breathtaking new view of the cosmos from the most powerful observatory ever launched into space.
The images included the deepest and sharpest infrared picture of the distant universe ever taken, revealing thousands of galaxies in a tiny patch of sky and capturing light that had travelled for more than 13 billion years. Other releases showed the dramatic "cliffs" of a stellar nursery in the Carina Nebula, a dying star shrouded in shells of gas, and the atmosphere of a distant gas-giant planet.
Webb, a joint project of NASA and the European and Canadian space agencies, launched in December 2021 after decades of development and billions of dollars in cost overruns. It then travelled 1.5 million kilometres from Earth and unfolded its giant gold-coated mirror and tennis-court-sized sunshield in a flawless sequence of risky manoeuvres.
Designed to see in infrared light, the telescope can peer through cosmic dust and look further back in time than its predecessor, Hubble, allowing astronomers to study the first galaxies that formed after the Big Bang and to probe the atmospheres of planets around other stars for signs of habitability.
Scientists described the first images as the beginning of a new era in astronomy, and a vindication of the long gamble that had gone into building the observatory. The real science, they said, was only just getting started.