প্রকাশ: 12/07/2022
US President Joe
Biden, pausing from political pressures to bask in the glow of the cosmos, on
Monday released the debut photo from NASA's James Webb Space Telescope - an
image of a galaxy cluster revealing the most detailed glimpse of the early
universe ever seen.
The White House sneak peek of Webb's first high-resolution,
full-color image came on the eve of a larger unveiling of photos and
spectrographic data that NASA plans to showcase on Tuesday at the Goddard Space
Flight Center in suburban Maryland.
The $9 billion Webb observatory, the largest and most
powerful space science telescope ever launched, was designed to peer through
the cosmos to the dawn of the known universe, ushering in a revolutionary era
of astronomical discovery.
The image showcased by Biden and NASA chief Bill Nelson
showed the 4.6 billion-year-old galaxy cluster named SMACS 0723, whose combined
mass acts as a "gravitational lens," distorting space to greatly
magnify the light coming from more distant galaxies behind it.
At least one of the faint, older specs of light appearing in
the "background" of the photo - a composite of images of different
wavelengths of light - dates back more than 13 billion years, Nelson said. That
makes it just 800 million years younger than the Big Bang, the theoretical
flashpoint that set the expansion of the known universe in motion some 13.8
billion years ago.
"It's a new window into the history of our
universe," Biden said before the picture was unveiled. "And today
we're going to get a glimpse of the first light to shine through that window:
light from other worlds, orbiting stars far beyond our own. It's astounding to
me."
He was joined at the Old Executive Office Building of the
White House complex by Vice President Kamala Harris, who chairs the US National
Space Council.
FROM GRAIN OF SAND IN THE SKY
On Friday, the space agency posted a list of five celestial
subjects chosen for its showcase debut of Webb. These include SMACS 0723, a
bejeweled-like sliver of the distant cosmos that according to NASA offers
"the most detailed view of the early universe to date." It also
constitutes the deepest and sharpest infrared image of the distant cosmos ever
taken.
The thousands of galaxies were captured in a tiny patch of
the sky roughly the size of a grain of sand held at arm's length by someone
standing on Earth, Nelson said.
Webb was constructed under contract by aerospace giant
Northrop Grumman Corp . It was launched to space for NASA and its European and
Canadian counterparts on Christmas Day 2021 from French Guiana, on the
northeastern coast of South America.
The highly anticipated release of its first imagery follows
six months of remotely unfurling Webb's various components, aligning its
mirrors and calibrating instruments.
With Webb now finely tuned and fully focused, scientists
will embark on a competitively selected list of missions exploring the evolution
of galaxies, the life cycles of stars, the atmospheres of distant exoplanets
and the moons of our outer solar system.
Built to view its subjects chiefly in the infrared spectrum,
Webb is about 100 times more sensitive than its 30-year-old predecessor, the
Hubble Space Telescope, which operates mainly at optical and ultraviolet
wavelengths.
The much larger light-collecting surface of Webb's primary
mirror - an array of 18 hexagonal segments of gold-coated beryllium metal -
enables it to observe objects at greater distances, thus further back in time,
than Hubble or any other telescope.
All five of Webb's introductory targets were previously
known to scientists. Among them are two enormous clouds of gas and dust blasted
into space by stellar explosions to form incubators for new stars - the Carina
Nebula and the Southern Ring Nebula, each thousands of light years away from
Earth.
The collection also includes a galaxy clusters known as
Stephan's Quintet, which was first discovered in 1877 and encompasses several
galaxies described by NASA as "locked in a cosmic dance of repeated close
encounters."
NASA will also present Webb's first spectrographic analysis
of an exoplanet - one roughly half the mass of Jupiter that lies more than
1,100 light years away - revealing the molecular signatures of filtered light
passing through its atmosphere.
- Reuters
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