The James Webb Space Telescope, one of NASA’s and the space community’s most exciting missions of the past decade has released its awaited first image. The enormous observation platform’s first image of distant galaxies behind neighboring galaxies was made public on a live-stream hosted by President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris.
NASA administrator Bill Nelson said, “If you held a grain of sand on the tip of your finger at arm’s length, that is the part of the universe that you’re seeing, just one little speck of the universe. And what you’re seeing there are galaxies, you’re seeing galaxies that are shining around other galaxies whose light has been bent.”
The image has been dubbed “Webb’s First Deep Field.” NASA explained the imaging technique as using the “nearby cluster’s mass to magnify and distort the light of objects behind them, permitting a deep field view into both the extremely distant and intrinsically faint galaxy populations.”
