“In a billion years or so, the sun will begin ballooning up into a red giant, losing its atmosphere and probably engulfing the inner planets, maybe even the Earth,” he said. “We are looking through our own ‘back door screen’ at the distant universe!”Īccording to Oswalt, this image offers a glimpse into the future. “The sharp whitish points with eight spikes that are sprinkled sparsely around this image - the brightest is near the center - are stars here in our Milky Way galaxy,” Oswalt added. That’s one of the main goals of the James Webb Space Telescope: to image the first generation of galaxies and help us understand how the universe formed. (Side note: The reddest and faintest galaxies pictured are the farthest away.) “Some of those background objects are about 13 billion light years away - almost at the earliest stage, when galaxies first began to form after the big bang.” “The huge mass of this cluster, which is about 4.6 billion light years away, focuses and magnifies the light of far more distant galaxies behind it that could not be seen otherwise - all those orange- and reddish-smeared blobs,” he said. Pictured above, this system could be called James Webb Space Telescope’s first deep-field image, Oswalt said. “And the stream of images and findings that this program is beginning to provide will offer some much-needed perspective on how science works and why the public should trust the scientific methods we use.”Ī breakdown of each of the first five photos released is below. “Apart from the ‘wow’ factor, taxpayers deserve to know what NASA does with their money,” Oswalt said. The more we can see, the more we can learn. “Astronomy is a visual science, and a picture is worth more than a thousand words.” Specs of Dust: A BreakdownĪlthough Oswalt notes that the first few of the images released by the James Webb Space Telescope are of already well-studied objects, the higher quality of the shots, thanks to the telescope’s infrared technology and size, offer more detailed pictures than ever before. “Images like these are far more interesting to me than the latest blockbuster movie,” Oswalt said. But here’s the thing: What we see in these shots is a just tiny, near-microscopic piece of the Southern Hemisphere sky - equal to a single grain of sand, if you held that grain between your fingers and stretched your arm out toward the stars. These images, he says, satisfy both of those cravings.Īfter all, the photos captured thousands of galaxies as well as black holes so massive that references to their size lose all meaning when described to scale (one is 24 million times the mass of our sun, for instance). As a person, though, he just wants to be wowed like anyone else. “Personally, that visceral sense of wonder is what attracted me to astronomy as a kid.”Īs a scientist, he wants to understand how life and its endless array of moving parts work together and evolve over time. “Humans have always wondered about our place in the cosmos, whether we are alone and what’s out there,” he said. He’s an astronomer, but he says that you don’t have to be one, too, in order to appreciate the science contained in these images. Terry Oswalt, associate dean for research and professor in Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University’s College of Arts and Sciences, is here to help. Still, even as you admired those shots of deep space, and even if they put you in a state of awe, you might have also been wondering - “What am I actually looking at?”ĭr. And you couldn’t miss them: They ran in seemingly every news publication around the world, in all of their full-color glory. The photos were the sharpest ever recorded in human history. The recent release of never-before-seen imagery from the James Webb Space Telescope - which featured glimpses of colliding galaxies and nebulas up to 13 billion light years away - was a huge deal.
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