James Webb Space Telescope: What is seen in the picture?

The James Webb Space Telescope has given a sneak peek into the billions of years into the past. A new image captured by the telescope was unveiled on Monday at the White House. US President Joe Biden called it a “historic moment of science and technology.”

The image will be followed on Tuesday by the release of four more galactic beauty shots from the telescope’s initial outward gazes.

Also Read: NASA reveals first image from James Webb Space Telescope: See here

What is seen in the new photo?

The “deep field” image released during a brief White House event is filled with lots of stars, with massive galaxies in the foreground and faint and extremely distant galaxies peeking through here and there.

Part of the image is light from not too long after the Big Bang, which was 13.8 billion years ago, according to reports from Associated Press citing NASA officials.

The image, which shows the faintest objects ever observed in the infrared, majorly focuses on galaxy cluster SMACS 0723. NASA chief Bill Nelson described the photo as a “speck of the universe.”

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

Neil DeGrasse Tyson, a celebrity scientist and host of the show ‘Cosmos’, also shared his insights on the image. In a social media post, he wrote: “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.”

When are the new photos coming?

The photo released on Monday was not the only one captured by the James Webb Space Telescope. NASA announced that more pictures will be released during a televised broadcast beginning at 10:30 a.m. EDT (14:30 UTC) on Tuesday, July 12, from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.