By Jonathan Amos
BBC Science Correspondent
Stunning images of a “stellar nursery” and a “cosmic dance” have been acquired by Nasa’s new $10bn space telescope.
The James Webb observatory, billed as the successor to the famous Hubble telescope, is showcasing its first full-colour pictures of the cosmos.
US President Joe Biden gave a teaser on Monday, with the release of a photo depicting very far-off galaxies.
Scientists on the project are following up with further images that demonstrate Webb’s diverse capabilities.
This will give it the ability to look deeper into the Universe than its predecessor and, as a consequence, detect events occurring further back in time – more than 13.5 billion years Astronomers also expect to use its more advanced technologies to study the atmospheres of distant planets in the hope that signs of life might be detected.
The initial batch of images are just a taster of what is to come, says Prof Gillian Wright, the British researcher who’s co-led one of Webb’s four infrared instruments.
“Whenever you look at the sky in a new way, you see things that you didn’t expect,” the director of the UK Astronomy Technology Centre told BBC News.
“The fact that these new data are so good, that they’re of such good quality, that they’ve been obtained in just a few hours of observations – that’s telling you that the discoveries are just sitting out there waiting to be SMACS 0723 is a huge cluster of galaxies. It’s known to astronomers as a “gravitational lens” because the mass of the cluster bends and magnifies the light of objects that are much further away.
Everywhere you see a red arc-like structure – that’s something – a galaxy – way off in the distance and far further back in time.
The light in some of those arcs has taken over 13 billion years to reach us. And here’s the slightly bizarre thing – some of those arcs on either side of the image are actually the same object. Their light has been bent through SMACS 0723 on more than one path.
