- The first picture of the
James Webb Space Telescope was released Monday. - It shows
space in unprecedented resolution, a huge advance on the 32-year oldHubble telescope .
The new image gave an unprecedented look at deepest space — and was a stunning improvement over similar images taken by its predecessor, the Hubble Space Telescope.
The JWST $4. It is six times larger and 100 times more powerful than $4
The image released on Monday shows a huge sweep of space and the JWST has far more detail than Hubble.
It was taken with near-infrared sensors, which captures a different spectrum than a conventional camera. As well as getting better results than Hubble, JWST works quicker. Hubble took weeks to scan its image of deep space, $4
Zooming in makes the comparison even clearer. The images below compare Hubble and JWST renderings of a cluster of galaxies called SMACs 0723 as it appeared around 4.6 billion years ago.
The huge time frame is a consequence of how far the light takes to travel from deep space to the telescopes orbiting Earth.
$4This area of space is particularly interesting for astronomers as the galaxies' gravitational pull distort the light of more distant galaxies behind them, a phenomenon known as gravitational lensing.
Examples of the light being distorted by the galaxies can be seen below:
Cosmologist $4 explained gravitational lensing in more detail in the video below:
JWST aims to look deeper into deep space than ever before. Its power will help fill a mysterious gap in the history of the universe — the first 400 million years after the big bang,$4
It $4
The next pictures will look at these zones:
- Carina Nebula: one of the largest and brightest nebulae in the sky, approximately 7,600 light-years away, which is a stellar nursery where stars form.
- WASP-96 b (spectrum): WASP-96 b is a giant planet outside of the solar system composed mainly of gas.
- Southern Ring Nebula: an expanding cloud of gas, surrounding a dying star approximately 2,000 light-years away from Earth.
- Stephan's Quintet: located in the constellation Pegasus, it is the first compact galaxy group ever discovered in 1877, about 290 million light-years away.