James Webb Space Telescope: How scientists, leaders reacted to the cosmic view

The James Webb Space Telescope has changed the meaning of the phrase: “The universe as we know it.” The first image from the $10 billion telescope gives a glimpse of what the universe looked like billions of years ago. World leaders, politicians, experts and science geeks were all excited about the new photo, which was released on Monday.

The image was released at a brief event at the White House, where US President Joe Biden was also present. He hailed it as a “historic moment for science.”

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Biden marveled at the newly released photo and said it showed “the oldest documented light in the history of the universe from over 13 billion — let me say that again — 13 billion years ago. It’s hard to fathom.”

Bill Nelson, the chief of NASA, explained that while the photo was a milestone for the space agency, it only showed “one little speck of the universe”, Associated Press reported.

“If you held a grain of sand up to the sky at arm’s length, that tiny speck is the size of Webb’s view in this image. Imagine — galaxies galore within a grain, including light from galaxies that traveled billions of years to us”, the official Twitter handle of the James Webb Telescope said.

Neil deGrasse Tyson, a celebrity scientist, wrote on Twitter: The spiked objects are local stars in our own Galaxy. ignore them. Everything else is an entire galaxy. Many distort into arcs, revealing spacetime curvature from the gravity of a galaxy cluster in the image’s center.

Also Read: James Webb vs Hubble: How the images from the two telescopes differ

Garth Illingworth, an astrophysicist who works at the University of California, “It takes a little bit of time to dig out those galaxies. It’s the things you almost can’t see here, the tiniest little red dots.”

“What we saw today is the early universe,” Harvard astronomer Dimitar Sasselov told Associated Press in an interview.