JawaPos.com – NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has produced the deepest and sharpest infrared image of the universe. Known as Webb’s First Deep Field, this image with the SMACS 0723 galaxy cluster recently revealed by NASA and US President Joe Bidden shows details about what our universe might look like.
Quoted from the official NASA website, thousands of galaxies, including the faintest objects ever observed in the infrared have appeared in the Webb telescope view for the first time. If we look closely, we see that the universe is so vast with clusters of galaxies that it gives us an idea of how small Earth and humans are.
This deep field, captured by the Webb Near Infrared Camera (NIRCam), is a composite made of images at different wavelengths, taking a total of 12.5 hours, reaching depth at infrared wavelengths beyond the Hubble Space Telescope’s deepest field. This image is then designed to show the shape of our universe and take weeks.
The image shows the galaxy cluster SMACS 0723 as it appeared 4.6 billion years ago. The combined mass of these galaxy clusters acts as a gravitational lens, magnifying galaxies much farther behind them.
Webb’s NIRCam has also brought these distant galaxies into sharp focus, appearing to have small, faint structures never seen before, including star clusters and diffuse features. Researchers will soon begin to learn more about the mass, age, history, and composition of galaxies, as Webb searches for the earliest galaxies in the universe.
The image is one of the telescope’s first full-color images. Indeed the universe looks colorful.
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