The first photo of the James Webb Space Telescope was shown live from the White House by United States President Joe Biden at midnight Italian time.
The incredible image, dubbed Webb's First Deep Field, shows the early Universe .
"These images will remind the world that America can do great things and will remind the American people - especially our children - that there is nothing beyond our capabilities," Biden said at the event. "We can see possibilities that no one has ever seen before. We can go to places where no one has ever gone before."
The new space telescope, observing in the infrared has been able to arrive where no eye has ever landed. At the center of the image, the cluster of galaxies SMACS 0723, 4.6 billion light years away, with its imposing mass, deforms space-time, creating an effect called "gravitational lens" .
Thanks to this phenomenon, well described by Einstein's general relativity, the cluster of galaxies bends space-time creating arcs of light , which are nothing more than galaxies behind the cluster itself. In the rest of the image, thousands of galaxies immersed in a dark ocean. The detail achieved by this image, which required a total duration of 12.5 hours, far exceeds those of similar shots taken by the Hubble Space Telescope.
Browsing the image we observe star formation zones in young galaxies, globular clusters in very distant galaxies and much more . "Scientists are thrilled that Webb is as alive and powerful as we hoped, far more than Hubble, and that he survived all the risks of becoming our golden eye in the sky," said John Mather, senior project scientist at Webb at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. "What happened after the Big Bang? How did the expanding universe cool and create black holes, galaxies, stars, planets and people? Astronomers see everything twice: first with images, then with imagination and calculations . But there is something out there that we have never imagined, and I will be as amazed as you are when we find out. "
This is the first shot, but four more images will be shown at 4:30 pm today. These include a detailed spectrum of WASP-96 b, a giant planet 1,150 light years away from Earth, which orbits its star every 3.4 days.
