The world’s most powerful telescope has started sending its first images of deep space back down to Earth.
Nasa’s James Webb Telescope has already captured breathtaking shots of galaxies nebulae that lie thousands — some even billions — of lightyears from Earth.
These were broadcast to the world on Monday evening during a livestream hosted by the space agency.
The photo reveal was broadcast on computers, phones and television sets around the world — including on the enormous screens at London’s Picadilly Circus.
So, lucky passers-by were treated to the telescope’s crisp images of deep space as they strolled through the city centre.
The image above shows the Southern Ring Nebula, which sits around 2,500 lightyears from Earth.
Nasa hopes the telescope will give astronomers a much more detailed understanding of neubulae: the clouds of gas and dust choked out by dying stars.
The picture above shows a group of galaxies known as Stephan’s Quartet. It is really a giant composite image created from almost 1,000 separate files. It holds over 150 million pixels.
The final image reveals many details about the galactic group that have never been seen before: millions of young stars and the nurseries where they appear, streams of dust, gas and stars pulled from the galazies by gravity and massive shockwaves caused by one galaxy as it collides with other galaxies in the cluster.
The image above is perhaps the most impressive of the series. Called Webb’s First Deep Field, it’s the deepest and sharpest infrared image ever produced of the distant universe.
It depicts a cluster of galaxies called SMACS 0723, that sit 5.12 billion light-years from Earth in a constellation known as Volans.
It was first revealed on Monday by US President Joe Biden, who showed off the image at a White House event.
The many engineers and scientists who’ve worked on the project will have breathed a sigh of relief when the telescope’s first photos finally arrived.
The space telescope went through years of delay before finally launching in December 2021.
It’s spent the last six months slowly adjusting its components in preparation for a mission that could last more than a decade.
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