Sneak a peek at the deepest and sharpest infrared image of the early universe ever taken — all in a day’s work for the Webb telescope. (Literally! Webb was able to capture this image in less than one day, while similar deep field images from Hubble can take multiple weeks.)
The NIRCam view (at right) is Webb’s first image released as we begin to #UnfoldTheUniverse:
nasa.gov/webbfirstimages/
Compare Webb’s Mid-Infrared (L) & Near-Infrared (R) views. Lens flares? Nope, the spikes you see are when light from bright objects like stars is bent by the edges of the telescope. They’re less prominent in mid-infrared.
If you held a grain of sand up to the sky at arm’s length, that tiny speck is the size of Webb’s view in this image. Imagine — galaxies galore within a grain, including light from galaxies that traveled billions of years to us! Why do some of the galaxies in this image appear bent? The combined mass of this galaxy cluster acts as a “gravitational lens,” bending light rays from more distant galaxies behind it, magnifying them.
More on diffraction spikes:
webbtelescope.org/contents/media/images/01G529MX46J7AFK61...
This image isn’t the farthest back we’ve ever observed. Non-infrared missions like COBE and WMAP saw the universe much closer to the Big Bang (about 380,000 years after), when there was only microwave background radiation, but no stars or galaxies yet. Webb sees a few 100 million years after the Big Bang.
The James Webb Space Telescope is an international collaboration between NASA, the European Space Agency and the Canadian Space Agency. The Space Telescope Science Institute is the science and mission operations center for Webb.
Credits: NASA, ESA, CSA, and STScI
Image description:
Side-by-side deep field images from the Webb telescope’s MIRI and NIRCam instruments. The MIRI image on the left is black, with bright glowing points of blue, yellow, red, orange, and green, which are galaxies and stars. The stars have stubby diffraction spikes radiating out, most prominently seen around a bright blue star just above and to the left of the center of the image. The right image from NIRCam also shows a black void of space. Against the black, stars and galaxies shine in oranges, yellows, whites and blues. Some of the galaxies are recognizably spirals, while some just look like colorful smudges of light. Near the center, where the gravitational lensing is occurring, some galaxies are doubled, forming a faint circle. In the center of the circle is a smear of white light. Sprinkled among the galaxies are stars, distinguishable by the diffraction spikes radiating out from them. The same bright blue star as seen in the MIRI image dominates the center of the NIRCam image.
