That same photo would’ve taken Hubble weeks, and contained much less detail.Ĭompare views of the Southern Ring nebula and its pair of stars by Webb’s NIRCam (L) & MIRI (R) instruments. This is like that, only much more complicated, more expensive, and badass. Merge the two together and you’ve got one properly exposed photo. Take two photos of the same landscape one with a properly lit foreground and a blown-out sky, the other with a visible sky and land too dark to see. Conventional dabblers in digital photography use Photoshop to do something similar when shooting in low-light scenarios. 0723 is itself another lens for the Webb Space Telescope.Īnother very cool aspect in a very long list of cool things about the telescope? That photo up there is essentially a 12.5-hour exposure, with infrared readings taken along different wavelengths for half a day and merged into a single composite image. We can see them in part because the gravity of the SMACS 0723 cluster is so powerful it bends and magnifies light from even farther galaxies. The faintest dots of light in the image are vastly older, galaxies that formed within a billion years of the Big Bang. SMACS 0723 as seen here is about 4.6 billion years old, slightly older than the planet on which we sit. The first image released was of galaxy cluster SMACS 0723. That’s the case here, as NASA shared with an eager globe of space nerds on Monday. And sometimes we get really cool computer backgrounds out of it. It’s action on a cosmic scale too vast to comprehend, but that’s the cool thing about humans some try anyway. Using infrared light the Webb Space Telescope can see back to about 180 million years post-Bang, right into the 80-million-year-long period when the first stars were taking shape. But by that point stars had already formed into galaxies. That’s already back more than 13 billion years. Hubble, using visible wavelengths of light, looks back to approximately 400 million years after the Big Bang. Light’s speed is inconsequential compared to the breadth of the universe, so the farther we look along its trail, the farther back in time we see. This allows it to see further back in time, a concept that still breaks my brain. It’s significantly more sensitive, able to detect objects 100 times fainter than the 32-year-old Hubble. Our latest tool in the war against ignorance is the James Webb Space Telescope, launched in December of 2021 to replace the aging Hubble Telescope. Modern tools have allowed us to glimpse far more than those ancestors could ever imagine, from atomic structures and DNA to solar systems and even individual planets that are microscopic on a galactic scale. Various civilizations mapped the orbits of the moon, planets, and stars over 5,000 years ago and formed the basis of our understanding of the universe. Humans have looked for knowledge among the stars ever since we stopped falling out of trees. Sir Isaac Newton first said, “The universe is amazeballs.” And he was right.
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