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High resolution nasa wallpaper8/24/2023 ![]() The collective bulk of SMACS 0723’s clustered galaxies is so great that it warps the surrounding space, forming a bubblelike “gravitational lens” through which the fainter light of much more distant background galaxies-perhaps among the very first luminous objects in the cosmos-is warped and magnified into view. (See a high-resolution zoomable version here.) Contemplating the Cosmic Dawn The entire galaxy-packed image spans a stretch of sky approximately the size of a sand grain held at arm's length. Most of those galactic jewels are more than four and a half billion light-years away, but they are a foreground distraction to the true treasure, which can be found in the dim, distorted shapes lurking in the darkness beyond. Captured by NIRCam, this image is Webb’s “deep field” observation of SMACS 0723, a crowded region of the cosmos strewn with galaxies like so many jewels on black velvet. The most striking of the first images has little to do with the search for extraterrestrial life, yet is still so spectacular that it wooed the White House into a last-minute change of plans, allowing President Biden to share in the observatory’s glory by presenting it to the world a day earlier than NASA originally intended. With these new images, Rieke says, “we are now seeing that the science returns are probably going to be even greater than we had dared to hope.” These and other preliminary tests, says NIRCam’s principal investigator Marcia Rieke of the University of Arizona, have shown that “all of Webb’s instruments are achieving even better sensitivities than we projected” and that the performance of its mirror is similarly exceeding expectations. Simple snapshots of a star obtained by the telescope’s workhorse instrument, the Near Infrared Camera (NIRCam), also serendipitously included more than 1,000 “photobombing” background galaxies that would have been too faint to simply swim into view in any other observatory’s optics. That deep freeze allows it to see-or rather feel-the infrared glow of far-flung galaxies, nearby planets and everything in between.Įven before today’s official images were released, earlier pictures taken to guide Webb’s complex deep-space commissioning hinted at the observatory’s stunning capabilities. Perched 1.5 million kilometers from Earth and shaded by a multilayered sunshield as big as a tennis court, the telescope’s kit is cooled close to the temperature of the vacuum of space. Each of the telescope’s latest images has marshaled the might of at least one of Webb’s four main instruments, as well as its giant 6.5-meter segmented primary mirror, composed of 18 coffee-table-sized hexagonal slabs of gold-plated beryllium that folded together like a piece of origami to fit within an Ariane 5 rocket. Now it promises to revolutionize our understanding of the cosmos during a mission that could stretch into the 2040s. But for a time, the observatory was more of a cruel joke among astronomers: the technical demands of its development pushed the project so far over budget and behind schedule that many suspected it would never launch at all. We can go places no one has ever gone before.”Ĭonstructed by NASA, as well as Europe’s and Canada’s space agencies, Webb is controversially named for a former NASA administrator, and it is the most powerful off-world observatory yet built. “We can see possibilities no one has ever seen before. “These images are going to remind the world that America can do big things, and remind the American people – especially our children – that there’s nothing beyond our capacity,” President Biden said during the event. President Joe Biden himself offered a sneak preview yesterday evening from the White House, revealing what is destined to be the most iconic picture from the set. After nearly three decades of troubled development and $10 billion in spending, a pulse-pounding launch on Christmas Day in 2021 and a nail-biting half-year of delicate preparations in deep space, the James Webb Space Telescope has at last delivered a complete set of first full-color images. The next great era of astronomy truly began this morning.
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