This image was published by NASA on Monday. It is the deepest and sharpest infrared image of the distant universe yet. It shows the galaxy cluster known as SMACS 0723 in incredible detail. The Webb Telescope captured it at a distance of 4.6 billion light years.
A machine for miracles
The James Webb space telescope, worth ten billion dollars (245 billion crowns), is a project of the American NASA with wider international participation, including the Czech Republic. The telescope was launched into space last December 25 by an Ariane 5 rocket from the Kourou Cosmodrome in French Guiana. It is the most powerful space telescope to date. The Webb Observatory should allow scientists to explore the history of the cosmos in the deepest depths of time and space, as well as search for signs of possible life outside the Solar System.
The telescope captured only a small part of the sky in the images. Describing it on Monday, President Biden compared it to the size of a grain of sand held in an outstretched hand. According to Michal Václavík from the Czech Space Agency, if the telescope continued scanning like this, it would take about thirty-eight to fifty thousand years to map the entire sky. “It is not within the power of humans, not even James Webb, to be able to photograph the whole thing,” said Václavík in the Program 90′ CT24. “But scientists have selected areas that are interesting to them and where they would like to look,” he added.
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“This observation actually lasted only about twelve hours,” described Martin Topinka from the Institute of Theoretical Physics and Astrophysics. “By comparison, the same image took Hubble about three weeks. Here you can see the huge difference. The James Webb telescope plans to observe the same area as the Hubble telescope for about 78 hours, but in much greater detail. I hope we break records for how far and deep we can see.’
According to Topinka, it is possible for scientists to use this device to look into the past about 200 million years after the Big Bang, i.e. to the times when the universe was still “in its infancy”.
The first published images are just a taste before the main course, points out British researcher Gillian Wright, who participated in the development and construction of one of the spectrographs on the telescope. “The fact that this new data is so good, that it’s of such quality, and that it was obtained in just a few hours of observation, suggests that there are discoveries out there just waiting to be made,” Wright told the BBC.
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