President Joe Biden Releases First Images Of James Webb Telescope, Detailed Photos Of Early Universe

US President Joe Biden unveiled the first images of the James Webb telescope. (photo: twitter @potus)

JAKARTA - US President Joe Biden, taking a break from political pressure to enjoy the light of the cosmos, on Monday, July 11 with the release of debut photos from NASA's James Webb Space Telescope. This is an image of a galaxy cluster that reveals the most detailed view of the early universe that humans have ever seen.

The White House glimpse of Webb's first full-color, high-resolution image appeared on the eve of the unveiling of larger spectrographic photos and data that NASA plans to exhibit on Tuesday, July 12 at the Goddard Space Flight Center in suburban Maryland.

The $9 billion Webb Observatory is the largest and most powerful space science telescope ever launched. The telescope was designed to peer through the cosmos into the early universe and usher in a revolutionary era of astronomical discoveries.

The image exhibited by Biden and NASA head Bill Nelson shows a 4.6 billion-year-old galaxy cluster called SMACS 0723, whose combined mass acts as a "gravitational lens," distorting space to magnify light coming from more distant galaxies behind it.

"At least one of the older faint lights appears in the "background" of the photo, a composite of images with different wavelengths of light, dating back more than 13 billion years," Nelson said. That makes the galaxy "only" 800 million years younger than the Big Bang, the theoretical flashpoint that governs the expansion of the universe known to move about 13.8 billion years ago.

The first image from the Webb Space Telescope represents a historic moment for science and technology. For astronomy and space exploration.

And for America and all humanity. pic.twitter.com/cI2UUQcQXj

— President Biden (@POTUS) July 11, 2022

"This is a new window into the history of our universe," Biden said before the image was released. "And today we're going to catch a glimpse of the first light shining through that window: light from another world, orbiting a star far beyond our own. This is astonishing to me."

Bidden was joined in the Old Executive Office Building in the White House complex with Vice President Kamala Harris, who heads the US National Space Council.

On Friday, the NASA space agency posted a list of five celestial subjects selected for Webb's debut showcase. These include cluster SMACS 0723, a gem-like slice of the distant cosmos that NASA says offers "the most detailed view of the early universe to date." It is also the deepest and sharpest infrared image of the distant cosmos ever taken.

"Thousands of galaxies are captured in a tiny patch of sky roughly the size of a grain of sand held by someone standing on Earth," Nelson said.

The Webb telescope was built under contract by aerospace giant Northrop Grumman Corp. The telescope was launched into space by NASA and colleagues in Europe and Canada on Christmas Day 2021 from French Guiana, on the northeast coast of South America.

The highly anticipated release of its first image follows six months of the telescope exposing the various components of Webb remotely, to align its mirrors and calibration instruments.

Now Webb is fine-tuned and fully focused. Scientists will embark on a list of competitively selected missions to explore the evolution of galaxies, the life cycles of stars, the atmospheres of distant exoplanets, and the moons of our outer solar system.

Built to view its subjects primarily in the infrared spectrum, Webb is about 100 times more sensitive than its 30-year-old predecessor, the Hubble Space Telescope, which operates primarily at optical and ultraviolet wavelengths.

The much larger light-gathering surface of Webb's main mirror, which is made up of an array of 18 hexagonal segments of gold-plated beryllium metal, allows it to observe objects at greater distances, thus further into the past, than Hubble or any other telescope.

The five targets of Webb's introduction were previously known to scientists. Between them were two large clouds of gas and dust blasted into space by stellar explosions to form new stellar incubators, the Carina Nebula and the Southern Ring Nebula, each thousand light-years from Earth.

The collection also includes a galaxy cluster known as Stephan's Quintet, which was first discovered in 1877 and includes several galaxies described by NASA as "locked in the cosmic dance of repeated close encounters."

NASA will also present Webb's first spectrographic analysis of an exoplanet, roughly half the mass of Jupiter that lies more than 1,100 light-years away, to reveal signs of light molecules being filtered through its atmosphere.