The European Space Agency has released images of the Moon for January. This is (perhaps unsurprisingly) a stunning shot from the Webb Space Telescope.
At the bottom of the image is LEDA 2046648, a spiral galaxy more than a billion light-years away from Earth in the constellation Hercules. Behind the LEDA are fields of more distant galaxies, ranging from spiral shapes to pinpricks of light in the distant universe.
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web launch From French Guiana in December 2021. Scientific observations of the universe began in July. imagined by web It sheds new light on distant galaxies, exoplanets, and even the world of our local solar system.
The image, which was just released, was taken during the commissioning of one of Webb’s instruments, the Near-Infrared Imager and Slitless Spectrograph (NIRISS), according to ESA. releaseWhile NIRISS focused on a white dwarf (the central remnant of a star), Webb’s near-infrared camera (NIRCam) focused on LEDA 2046648 and its surroundings in the night sky.
One of Webb’s main goals in observing the distant universe is to better understand how the first stars and galaxies formed. To that end, the telescope sees some of the oldest light in the universe, primarily through its instruments NIRCam and his MIRI.
The image contains hundreds of light sources that our eyes can see, but the infrared data from which the image was formed recorded many more galaxies.
webs deep field image It allows scientists to see some of the oldest light in the universe, often using gravitational lensing (magnification of distant light due to the gravitational distortion of space-time) to see particularly ancient light sources. I can.
This shot of LEDA 2046648 isn’t deep field, but it evokes a similar feeling. It’s an awe of the vast scale of the universe and the realization that our minds can only comprehend a tiny fraction of it (albeit only a little bit).
Details: Zoom in on the Webb Telescope’s largest image yet
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