During an exciting NASA live broadcast, also featuring President Joe Biden, the first science photos from the Webb Space Telescope (JWST) were released. NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has produced the deepest and sharpest infrared image of the distant universe to date. Known as the first Webb Deep Field, this image of the galaxy cluster SMACS 0723 is brimming with detail. Thousands of galaxies, including the faintest objects ever observed in the infrared, appeared in Webb’s view for the first time. This slice of the vast universe covers a portion of the sky about the size of a grain of sand held at arm’s length by someone on Earth. This deep field, taken by Webb’s Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam), is a composite of images taken at different wavelengths over a 12.5-hour period, reaching infrared wavelength depths beyond the Hubble Space Telescope’s deepest fields, which took weeks. The image shows the galaxy cluster SMACS 0723 as it appeared 4.6 billion years ago. The combined mass of this galaxy cluster acts like a gravitational lens, magnifying the much more distant galaxies behind it. Webb’s NIRCam brought these distant galaxies into sharp focus: they have tiny, faint structures never seen before, including star clusters and diffuse features. Researchers will soon begin to learn more about the masses, ages, histories, and compositions of galaxies as Webb searches for the earliest galaxies in the universe.
