The dawn of a new era in astronomy has begun as the world gets its first look at the full capabilities of the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope. Photo: ESA/WEBB / AFP
President Joe Biden got it spot-on this week when he remarked that the images from the distant cosmos revealed by the James Webb Space Telescope were “hard to even fathom”.
Nasa, the US Space Agency, released what is the clearest image to date of our early universe, going back 13 billion years, not long after its birth in the “singularity” known as the “Big Bang”.
The first image was of a star cluster called SMACS 0723 and it, in turn, showed even more distant galaxies peppering the night sky.
The light from those galaxies had originated more than 13 billion years ago, meaning James Webb had allowed us to look back into our past.
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Scientists are beside themselves.
The space telescope has revealed galaxies whose presence was only made visible by the gravitational field of the cluster.
Other images showed that gravitational fields around some celestial bodies were strong enough to bend light… just as physics genius Albert Einstein predicted early in the 20th century.
Although Biden tried to trumpet US scientific superiority at the announcement, the reality is that European and Canadian agencies played a major role in the project.
National division seems so trivial in the face of the vastness of the universe.
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