NASA’s revolutionary, long-delayed $10 billion James Webb Space Telescope has produced its first full-color image, and it’s a doozy: a glimpse deep into space and back in time, capturing the faint light of galaxies forming in the infancy of the cosmos.
The image, revealed Monday in a White House ceremony by President Biden and top NASA officials, shows a cluster of galaxies, called SMACS 0723, that functions as a massive lens, magnifying the extremely faint and cosmically distant objects behind it.
“We’re looking back more than 13 billion years,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said at the White House event. “Light travels at 186,000 miles per second, and that light that you are seeing from one of those little specks, has been traveling for over 13 billion years.”
He added: “And by the way, we’re going back further. Because this is just the first image. … We’re going back almost to the beginning.”
The new image is what is known as a “deep field” observation, with the telescope staring at what NASA called a “patch of sky approximately the size of a grain of sand held at arm’s length by someone on the ground.”
Outer space when viewed like this looks incredibly crowded — not so very spacious at all. What the Webb sees through this pinhole examination of the cosmic darkness is a hornet’s nest of brilliant but enigmatic objects in many colors. A smattering of stars have parked themselves in the foreground, but everything else is a galaxy — a vast agglomeration of stars, rendered into a small splash of light by the immense distances involved.
Strikingly, the lensing effect has distorted some of the distant galaxies in the background, making them appear stretched and manipulated, as if made of Play-Doh.
kcdave wrote: ↑Sat Sep 09, 2023 8:05 am
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Derron wrote: ↑Sat Oct 03, 2020 3:07 pm
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Do you believe it is the faint light of galaxies forming in the infancy of the cosmos
?
kcdave wrote: ↑Sat Sep 09, 2023 8:05 am
I was actually going to to join in the best bets activity here at good ole T1B...The guy that runs that contest is a fucking prick
Derron wrote: ↑Sat Oct 03, 2020 3:07 pm
You are truly one of the worst pieces of shit to ever post on this board. Start giving up your paycheck for reparations now and then you can shut the fuck up about your racist blasts.
“My dentist, that’s another beauty, my dentist, you kiddin’ me. It cost me five thousand dollars to have all new teeth put in. Now he tells me I need braces!” —Rodney Dangerfield
Top French Scientist Admits Photo He Tweeted of ‘Space Telescope
Image’ of Nearest Star to the Sun Was Just a Slice of Chorizo
Don’t ever question the scientists because the science is settled.
Top French scientist Etienne Klein tweeted a photo of a slice of chorizo and told his nearly 100,000 Twitter
followers that it was a ‘space telescope image’ of the nearest star to the sun.
Tens of thousands of people believed him without questioning anything.
The tweet has received tens of thousands of ‘likes’ and ‘retweets.’
“Picture of Proxima Centauri, the nearest star to the Sun, located 4.2 light years away from us. It was taken
by the James Webb Space Telescope. This level of detail… A new world is unveiled everyday,” Klein said on
Sunday...
