NASA | This is deep space: NASA releases deepest picture of our universe ever taken

The first deep space image was released from the James Webb Space Telescope on July 11 at a ceremony at the White House by the President of the United States, Joe Biden.

This first observation, among the five announced last week, corresponds to a “deep field”, an image taken with an extremely long exposure time, to detect the faintest objects in the distance. Webb achieved this shot by pointing his main imager at SMACS 0723, an assemblage of massive foreground galaxy clusters that amplify and distort light from objects behind them, allowing deep-field views of both extremely distant as well as intrinsically faint galaxies.

Last month, NASA Administrator Bill Nelson called this observation, now released on the Web, “the deepest image of our universe ever taken” in the infrared. It’s 13,000 million light-years across, as commented in the presentation in front of Biden.

NASA will release the rest of the first wave of images from the Webb Telescope on Tuesday. They correspond to the Carina Nebula, the spectrum of the planet WASP-96b, the Southern Ring Nebula, and the compact group of galaxies called Stephan’s Quintet.

The Webb Space Telescope is an international mission led by NASA, the European Space Agency, and the Canadian Space Agency. Launched on Christmas Day 2021, and finally positioned 1.5 million kilometers from Earth, its 6.5-meter main mirror promises much more precise observations than those of its predecessor, the Hubble telescope.