The James Webb Space Telescope is very powerful.
A newly released image of the galaxy from the European Space Agency shows a deep view of the universe unseen by other telescopes. The oldest galaxies in the universe are so far away that their light literally extends to wavelengths invisible to our eyes. Highlighted by NASA(opens in new window)is to see light at these longer infrared wavelengths.
When Webb looks at such a distant place in space, the device look back in time billions of years. This image shows what the galaxy looked like when the light left long ago.
Others shown in the image below are:
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Near the bottom of the foreground is a brilliant example of a spiral galaxy called LEDA 2046648. At about 1 billion light years away, it’s much closer than even distant galaxies. Our Milky Way is also a spiral galaxy.
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Everything else in this image is a galaxy, except for the much closer star, the hexagram. (Bright spots in the light of telescopes like Webb can cause what are called “diffraction spikes.”)(opens in new window) From the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope, along with a bright star crowned with Webb’s signature six-point diffraction spike,” explained the European Space Agency (ESA).(opens in new window).
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Many distant galaxies appear reddish or orange. As the universe expands and these bodies move farther away, their light is stretched. “Webb’s sharp infrared vision will help telescopes travel back in time because the light from these distant galaxies is redshifted toward infrared wavelengths,” he said.
Related item:Many of the Webb Telescope’s greatest discoveries don’t come from stunning photos
Deep view of space. LEDA 2046648 is the large galaxy at the bottom.
Credit: ESA Webb / NASA / CSA / A. Martel
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The Webb Telescope is a scientific collaboration between NASA, ESA, and the Canadian Space Agency. In this image, astronomers were actually capturing views of galaxies and stars to calibrate their telescope’s sensitive instruments. A larger research goal is to compare an unprecedented view of the first and earliest galaxies in the Milky Way and those closer to us. Astronomers want to understand how galaxies like ours grew and evolved.
Many of these galaxies contain hundreds of billions of stars and many more planets. That makes for an incomprehensible number of strange new worlds that we probably can’t even imagine.
