Biden reveals first image from NASA’s new space telescope

(AP) - President Joe Biden on Monday revealed the first image from NASA’s new space telescope — the deepest view of the cosmos ever captured.

The first image from the $10 billion James Webb Space Telescope shows galaxy cluster SMACS 0723, the deepest photo of the universe ever captured.

The White House held the presentation during an event with NASA Administrator Bill Nelson.

That image will be followed Tuesday by the release of four more galactic beauty shots from the telescope’s initial outward gazes.

The images to be released Tuesday include a view of a giant gaseous planet outside our solar system, two images of a nebula where stars are born and die in spectacular beauty and an update of a classic image of five tightly clustered galaxies that dance around each other.

“We’re going to give humanity a new view of the cosmos,” Nelson told reporters last month in a briefing. “And it’s a view that we’ve never seen before.”

The telescope “can see backwards in time to just after the Big Bang by looking for galaxies that are so far away that the light has taken many billions of years to get from those galaxies to our telescopes,” Webb’s deputy project scientist Jonathan Gardner said.

Over the next few days, astronomers will do intricate calculations to figure out just how old those galaxies are, project scientist Klaus Pontoppidan said last month.

___

AP Aerospace Writer Marcia Dunn contributed.

___

The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

Copyright 2022 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.