Arthur Greene
The first images from the new James Webb Telescope have been released, revealing galaxies that are older and farther away than any we have ever seen before.
The wonderful full-colour pictures show galaxies – groups of billions of stars – as they were not long after the beginning of the universe itself.
The image above is of an area of space called SMACS 0723. Some of the light that you can see in the picture is from galaxies that are 13 billion light years away.
A light year is the distance light travels in a single year. To put this into perspective, light from the sun, which is 150 million kilometres away, takes about eight minutes to reach us.
This means that the light from those farthest galaxies had been travelling for 13 billion years before they reached the James Webb Telescope.
When we look at the picture, we are looking at galaxies as they were billions of years ago literally pictures into the past.
The universe itself is 13.8 billion years old, so these are some of the very first stars ever formed.
“Webb can see backwards in time just after the Big Bang by looking for galaxies that are so far away, the light has taken many billions of years to get from those galaxies to ourselves,” said Jonathan Gardner, deputy senior project scientist at US space agency Nasa, during a recent news conference.
Unveiling the images on Monday, US President Joe Biden described the moment as “historic”, calling the pictures “a new window into the history of our universe”.
The James Webb Telescope, the most powerful telescope ever launched into space, took off from French Guiana at the end of 2021. It was developed by Nasa and its international partners, the European and Canadian space agencies.
The R170 billion telescope has two aims. The first is to capture images of the first ever stars to shine in the universe over 13.5 billion years ago. The second is to locate and capture images of planets that humans might one day inhabit.
“They’re amazing in themselves just as images. But the hints of the detailed science we’re going to be able to do with them is what makes me so excited,” deputy project scientist Dr Amber Straughn told BBC News.
More spectacular images of the cosmos were released on Tuesday, including pictures of a “stellar nursery” and a “cosmic dance”.
