We are seeing farther than ever before.
NASA has officially taken the deepest ever image of space thanks to an expensive new telescope that can view objects previously invisible to us.
The telescope is so high-tech that it is able to see things more than 13 billion years in the past. For context, the universe is approximately 13.8 billion years old.
The staggering picture is the first to be taken by the world's most advanced telescope, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), a new £8.4 billion machine that is designed to see objects using infrared light and is twice as powerful as the Hubble.
https://twitter.com/NASA/status/1546621144358391808?s=20&t=KksdRZuxMFkp9-74xXgUCQ
The infrared view, which has captured the most distant image of the universe in human history, has been dubbed
Webb’s First Deep Field and depicts a galaxy cluster designated SMACS 0723.
As you can see, the image itself is overflowing with twinkling detail and according to NASA scientists, this particular shot alone contains thousands of galaxies, including the faintest objects ever observed in infrared - otherwise invisible to the human eye.
They went on to compare this snapshot of the universe as covering a patch of sky approximately the size of a grain of sand held at arm’s length by someone on the ground.
This incredible insight was made possible with the help of the ESA (European Space Agency) and CSA (Canadian Space Agency).
The JWST first launched back on Christmas Day in 2021 and took 30 years to build.
In an official statement following the publication of these images, NASA administrator Bill Nelson said:
"We're looking back more than 13 billion years... and we're going further... this is just the first image and since we know the universe is 13.8 billion years old, we're going back almost to the beginning.
"It is going to be so precise you are going to see whether or not planets are habitable. And when you look at something as big as this, we're going to be able to answer questions that we don't even know what the questions are yet."
The image itself was unveiled during a special preview event held at the White House.
US President Joe Biden said that the staggering new technology has provided us with a “new window into the history of our universe” and that this is just "a glimpse at the first light to shine through that window”.
