US President Joe Biden unveiled the first color image from NASA’s James Webb telescope at the White House yesterday. This first image shows how powerful and sharp the infrared telescope is.

“These pictures remind us that America is capable of great things and remind the American people – especially our children – that there’s nothing we can’t do,” President Biden said at the unveiling. “We see possibilities that no one has ever seen before. We can travel to places no one has ever been before.”

Human ingenuity

Webb’s first color image shows thousands of galaxies, including the most distant objects ever seen in infrared. “Webb’s first ‘Deep Field’ is not only the first full-color image, it is also the deepest and sharpest infrared image of a distant part of the universe to date. This image includes a sliver of air the size of a grain of sand at arm’s length. It’s a tiny sliver of the vast universe,” said NASA’s Bill Nelson. “This mission was made possible by human ingenuity – the amazing NASA Webb team and our international partners from the European and Canadian Space Agency (ESA and CSA). Webb is just the beginning of what we can achieve in the future if we work together for the benefit of humanity.”

preview

The photo is a preview of even more images to be released this afternoon at 4.30pm GMT. The image shows a galaxy cluster called SMACS 0723, as it looked 4.6 billion years ago. The cluster’s combined mass acts like a magnifying glass by also magnifying much more distant galaxies behind it. Webbs NIRCam has brought these distant galaxies into sharp focus. They have tiny indistinct structures that have never been seen before. Scientists will soon learn more about the mass, age, history and composition of the galaxies as Webb searches for the very earliest galaxies in our universe.

The James Webb space telescope is the successor to the famous Hubble and cost about 8 billion euros. Webb was launched on Christmas Day last year from French Guiana in South America. After months of focusing and preparing instruments, the first pictures of distant galaxies are now coming.

First image from James Webb telescope. Photo: NASA, ESA, CSA, and STScI