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New Scientist

Jul 11 • 9 tweets • 5 min read

@NASAWebb

This is the stunning first full-colour science image from the James #Webb Space Telescope

Presented by US president Joe Biden today, the @NASAWebb image is our deepest and highest-resolution look at the universe yet #UnfoldTheUniverse

newscientist.com/article/232813…

“Webb’s First Deep Field”, as the image is known, shows a region of space called SMACS 0723, which contains what’s called a gravitational lens

This is when a massive and relatively nearby object acts like a magnifying glass - boosting the light of background objects

The gravitational lens in SMACS 0723 is particularly strong because the nearby object is a large cluster of galaxies

The small specks and streaks of light visible around the edges of the image are distant, incredibly faint galaxies – some of the first that ever formed

We couldn’t see these galaxies before partially because of the expansion of the universe: the further away an object is, the faster it is moving away from us and the redder its light appears because of that motion

newscientist.com/article/232795…

@NASAWebb

The Hubble Space Telescope, @NASAWebb’s predecessor, observes mainly in visible wavelengths, but JWST uses infrared, allowing it to spot objects that appear so red that they’ve become invisible to Hubble

@stewilkins

“We think that when stars form from primordial material in the distant universe, they form in a very different way, but we’ve never really observed that before,” says @stewilkins at @SussexUni

“There’s a lot of crucial physics there that we don’t know anything about”

James #Webb Space Telescope launched from French Guiana at the end of 2021 and arrived in its final orbit around the sun in early 2022

Now, the first images with high enough quality to use for science have started to beam down to Earth

@NASAWebb

With four more images scheduled for release tomorrow, these first images are a tantalising hint of what’s to come from @NASAWebb

“Almost every field of astronomy is going to learn new things,” says Wendy Freedman @UChicago

@NASAWebb

From the prospect of alien life to the origins of supermassive black holes - here are the big mysteries @NASAWebb may unravel
newscientist.com/article/mg2553…

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