TechCentralTechCentral
    Facebook Twitter YouTube LinkedIn
    Facebook Twitter LinkedIn YouTube
    TechCentralTechCentral
    NEWSLETTER
    • News

      Standard Bank IT spending tops R10-billion in six months

      19 August 2022

      Hungry Prosus to splurge up to R30.7-billion on iFood stake

      19 August 2022

      Koeberg unit shut down due to mechanical fault

      19 August 2022

      Blue Label expects robust full-year earnings growth

      19 August 2022

      Sarb tells banks they should work with crypto exchanges

      18 August 2022
    • World

      15 September pegged as target date for ethereum’s big ‘Merge’

      19 August 2022

      Qualcomm gets serious about servers

      19 August 2022

      China blasts US over ‘discriminatory’ Chips Act

      18 August 2022

      Tencent reports first-ever sales decline

      17 August 2022

      Chip makers are flashing a big warning for the global economy

      17 August 2022
    • In-depth

      Are you a chronic procrastinator? Read this!

      18 August 2022

      Semiconductor boom turns to bust

      16 August 2022

      African unicorn Flutterwave battles fires on multiple fronts

      11 August 2022

      The length of Earth’s days has been increasing – and no one knows why

      7 August 2022

      As Facebook fades, the Mad Men of advertising stage a comeback

      2 August 2022
    • Podcasts

      Qush on infosec: why prevention is always better than cure

      11 August 2022

      e4’s Adri Führi on encouraging more women into tech careers

      10 August 2022

      How South Africa can woo more women into tech

      4 August 2022

      Book and check-in via WhatsApp? FlySafair is on it

      28 July 2022

      Interview: Why Dell’s next-gen PowerEdge servers change the game

      28 July 2022
    • Opinion

      How AI could transform financial services in emerging markets

      19 August 2022

      No reason South Africa should have a shortage of electricity: Ramaphosa

      11 July 2022

      Ntshavheni’s bias against the private sector

      8 July 2022

      South Africa can no longer rely on Eskom alone

      4 July 2022

      Has South Africa’s advertising industry lost its way?

      21 June 2022
    • Company Hubs
      • 1-grid
      • Africa Data Centres
      • Altron Document Solutions
      • Amplitude
      • Atvance Intellect
      • Axiz
      • BOATech
      • CallMiner
      • Digital Generation
      • E4
      • ESET
      • Euphoria Telecom
      • IBM
      • Kyocera Document Solutions
      • Microsoft
      • Nutanix
      • One Trust
      • Pinnacle
      • Skybox Security
      • SkyWire
      • Tarsus on Demand
      • Videri Digital
      • Zendesk
    • Sections
      • Banking
      • Broadcasting and Media
      • Cloud computing
      • Consumer electronics
      • Cryptocurrencies
      • Education and skills
      • Energy
      • Fintech
      • Information security
      • Internet and connectivity
      • Internet of Things
      • Investment
      • IT services
      • Motoring and transport
      • Public sector
      • Science
      • Social media
      • Talent and leadership
      • Telecoms
    • Advertise
    TechCentralTechCentral
    Home»News»Behold the Webb telescope’s first full-colour image

    Behold the Webb telescope’s first full-colour image

    News By Agency Staff12 July 2022
    Facebook Twitter LinkedIn WhatsApp Telegram Email

    US President Joe Biden has 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-colour image came on the eve of a larger unveiling of photos and spectrographic data that Nasa plans to showcase on Tuesday.

    The US$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 highly anticipated release of its first imagery follows six months of remotely unfurling Webb’s various components,

    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.”

    On Friday, the space agency posted a list of five celestial subjects chosen for its showcase debut of Webb. These include SMACS 0723, a bejewelled-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.

    Thousands of galaxies

    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.

    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.

    US President Joe Biden applauds upon seeing the first images from the Webb Space Telescope during a briefing from Nasa officials at the White House. Kevin Lamarque/Reuters

    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.  — Jeff Mason, with Steve Gorman and Joey Roulette, (c) 2022 Reuters

    Bill Nelson James Webb Space Telescope Joe Biden JWST Nasa
    Share. Facebook Twitter LinkedIn WhatsApp Telegram Email
    Previous ArticleCape Town mayor’s 10-point plan to end load shedding
    Next Article How AI can help companies improve customer collections

    Related Posts

    Standard Bank IT spending tops R10-billion in six months

    19 August 2022

    Hungry Prosus to splurge up to R30.7-billion on iFood stake

    19 August 2022

    Koeberg unit shut down due to mechanical fault

    19 August 2022
    Add A Comment

    Comments are closed.

    Promoted

    Does your contact centre have the CX factor?

    19 August 2022

    Entelek, A2pay to roll out 2 500 free Wi-Fi sites in South Africa

    18 August 2022

    Companies are drowning in data – but solutions are at hand

    18 August 2022
    Opinion

    How AI could transform financial services in emerging markets

    19 August 2022

    No reason South Africa should have a shortage of electricity: Ramaphosa

    11 July 2022

    Ntshavheni’s bias against the private sector

    8 July 2022

    Subscribe to Updates

    Get the best South African technology news and analysis delivered to your e-mail inbox every morning.

    © 2009 - 2022 NewsCentral Media

    Type above and press Enter to search. Press Esc to cancel.