“Webb can see backwards in time to just after the Big Bang by looking for galaxies that are so far away that the light has taken many billions of years to get from those galaxies to our telescopes,” said Jonathan Gardner, Webb’s deputy project scientist said during a June media briefing. Astronomers measure how far back they look in light-years with one light-year being 5.8 trillion miles (9.3 trillion kilometers). It found the light wave signature of an extremely bright galaxy in 2016. Hubble has stared as far back as 13.4 billion years. Webb is considered the successor to the highly successful, but aging Hubble Space Telescope. “This is everything we’ve dreamed of in a telescope like this.” “This is absolutely spectacular, absolutely amazing,” he added. “It’s the things you almost can’t see here, the tiniest little red dots.” “It takes a little bit of time to dig out those galaxies,” University of California, Santa Cruz, astrophysicist Garth Illingworth said. Outside scientists said those calculations will take time, but they are fairly certain somewhere in the busy image is a galaxy older than humanity has ever seen, probably back to 500 million or 600 million years after the Big Bang. How far back past 13 billion years did that first image look? NASA didn’t provide any estimate Monday. The plan is to use the telescope to peer back so far that scientists will get a glimpse of the early days of the universe about 13.7 billion years ago and zoom in on closer cosmic objects, even our own solar system, with sharper focus. Then the lengthy process began to align the mirrors, get the infrared detectors cold enough to operate and calibrate the science instruments, all protected by a sunshade the size of a tennis court that keeps the telescope cool. It reached its lookout point 1 million miles (1.6 million kilometers) from Earth in January. The world’s biggest and most powerful space telescope rocketed away last December from French Guiana in South America. The pictures on tap include a view of a giant gaseous planet outside our solar system, two images of a nebula where stars are born and die in spectacular beauty and an update of a classic image of five tightly clustered galaxies that dance around each other. ![]() Sasselov said he and his colleague Charles Alcock first thought “we’ve seen this before.” Then they looked closer at the image and pronounced the result not only beautiful but “worth all that waiting” for the much-delayed project.Īnd even more is coming Tuesday.
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