This kind of deep-field science is a fairly new discipline. We have stretched our perception of the universe from the night sky to the planets, to other suns and other galaxies, and soon we’ll catch the light that’s even older, even farther from us-closer to the big, mysterious moment when the universe began. Here we are, on this little ball of rock in a boundless universe, and we have managed to glimpse the universe as it was billions of years before we even existed. But on a deeper level (sorry) the image represents something else, a cosmic leveling up of sorts. This is a bunch of space agencies shouting to the public: Look, this $10 billion space telescope that we’ve spent more than 25 years working on-it works! It works beautifully. The image released today is, on a practical level, proof of mission success for NASA and its partners in this ambitious effort, the European Space Agency and the Canadian Space Agency. And every new image has the potential to become our deepest view yet. Just about every image Webb takes of a given cosmic object is going to count as a deep-field image, a snapshot from previously unreachable depths, the background twinkling with faraway galaxies that the telescope just happened to catch. Today’s image isn’t as deep as Webb can go, but astronomers on the Webb team are still surprised at how good it looks, and they’ve realized something extraordinary about the observatory’s capabilities. Remember Hubble, and that glorious deep-field image from the 1990s, sparkling with thousands of galaxies? The Webb telescope was designed to spot celestial objects that are about 100 times fainter than the ones Hubble can detect. All this light has been captured in unprecedented detail by the most powerful space telescope in history, making this one of the deepest, most high-resolution pictures of the universe that humankind has ever taken.Īstronomers call this kind of view a “deep field”: a picture of one spot in space, made with long exposure times so that the instrument can really bask in any incoming light. The light from the galaxies in the foreground left 4.6 billion years ago, and the light from the galaxies beyond those, even longer. It is also, more important, an entirely new view of the universe. The picture is sparkly and beautiful, a great choice for a computer background. It is the first real snapshot from the mission, which launched more than six months ago and currently orbits about 1 million miles from Earth. The image, released today, was taken by the world’s newest space observatory, the James Webb Space Telescope. The cosmic gems fill up every corner of the frame, each one captured the way it appeared billions of years ago, when the starlight left its shimmery edges and began wafting across the universe. The effect magnifies their brightness, bringing thousands of them out of the darkness. Some of the galaxies in the foreground are part of a cluster called SMACS 0723, so massive that its gravity warps the light coming from other, more distant galaxies. Those bright, spiky points are nearby stars, but every tiny oval, every gleaming blob is a distant galaxy, a swirling creation brimming with stars and dust and planets. This article was featured in One Story to Read Today, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a single must-read from The Atlantic, Monday through Friday.
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