11/14/2023 0 Comments James webb telescope photosSince it arrived at its new cosmic home, Lagrange Point 2, on Jan. 25, 2021, from Europe's Spaceport in French Guiana. NASA's $10 billion James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) launched on Dec. The Webb telescope is powerful enough to pick up even those really distant, faintly lit galaxies in the background.Īnd some of those galaxies, which look like tiny specks in the image, are so far away that the light we can spot from them was first emitted right after the universe began.(Image credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI J. The group of galaxies is big enough that it affects gravity in the space around it, in such a way that other galaxies are more easily spotted by the telescope - even though they're even further away. A galaxy cluster is just what it sounds like - a group of galaxies, all relatively close to each other in space.Ĭluster SMACS 0723 in particular "is teeming with thousands of galaxies – including the faintest objects ever observed in the infrared." Within that speck is galaxy cluster SMACS 0723, NASA said. "Webb’s image is approximately the size of a grain of sand held at arm’s length, a tiny sliver of the vast universe," NASA said in a release about the photo. The Webb telescope took a "deep field" image, where it zoomed into one tiny speck of space that, to other previous telescopes and the naked eye, looks like empty blackness. The first image released by NASA on Tuesday demonstrates that power. This slice of the vast universe covers a patch of sky approximately the size of a grain of sand held at arm’s length by someone on the ground. Thousands of galaxies – including the faintest objects ever observed in the infrared – have appeared in Webb’s view for the first time. Known as Webb’s First Deep Field, this image of galaxy cluster SMACS 0723 is overflowing with detail. NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has produced the deepest and sharpest infrared image of the distant universe to date. "Since the age of the universe is about 13.8 billion years, these distant observations allow astronomers to measure changes over the lifetime of the universe." "At that distance, light tells what the universe was like billions of years ago," the website for the Webb Telescope explains. The Webb telescope and the photos it produced are notable, in part, because the telescope is powerful enough to capture light from galaxies that are billions of light-years away. It's actually a measure of distance, consisting of the space light can travel in one Earth year, at speed of 186,282 miles per second. That's where the term light-year comes from. ![]() That means when you look up at the moon, you're actually seeing the moon as it was 1.3 seconds ago. Light that hits the moon takes about 1.3 seconds to travel across those 239,000 miles and reach your eyes, according to NASA. ![]() One flip of the switch, and the light is already there.īut over the huge distances between galaxies in space, that travel time starts to matter more.Įven something as close on a cosmic scale as the moon, which is a miniscule 239,000 miles away from Earth, is affected by the phenomenon. It seems like almost the same thing across smaller distances, like the space between a lamp turning on in your living room, and your spot across that room on the couch. Light moves incredibly quickly, but fast isn't the same as instantaneous. Sign up for NBC LA newsletters.Īccording to NASA, telescopes can be time machines, and it all has to do with the speed at which light travels through space. Get Southern California news, weather forecasts and entertainment stories to your inbox.
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