New James Webb Space Telescope test image reveals deepest ever glimpse into the infrared universe

There are hundreds of distant galaxies in the deepest ever glimpse into the infrared universe revealed by an engineering image acquired during testing of one of James Webb Space Telescope's instruments

The image, released by NASA on Wednesday (July 6), was captured by the James Webb Space Telescope over an eight day period in May and contains 72 snapshots. The FGS is built by the Canadian Space Agency and is not a science instrument.

The stunning image shows a glimpse of what's to come when the most powerful and expensive space observatory ever built begins its ambitious science work. The first images from the telescope will be revealed on Tuesday at 10:30 a.m. You can watch live at Space.com.

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The false-color image was taken during a "roll" test by FGS. The telescope rolled from side to side as it focused on a star called HD147980. The telescope was pointed at its target during the test. The resulting image shows the universe in a color scale from white to red, with brighter objects in the middle and dimmer ones in the background.

The stars are marked by the spikes that make them look like a plus sign. In the new tab, you can see the rest of the universe.

The types of faint galaxies that will be studied in the first year of science operations are the faintest blobs in the picture.

There are signs of the dithering effect in the image, which leaves black dots at the center of the stars. saturation of the detectors is caused by the telescope adjusting its position between exposures.

NASA said in a statement that FGS's primary purpose is not to take scientific images, and that most of its photos will be thrown away. By helping the telescope to point at the stars and galaxies the scientists are interested in, the instrument's job is accomplished. The images show some of the ground-breaking discoveries that will be made at the observatory.

"When this image was taken, I was very excited to see all the detailed structure in these faint galaxies," said Neil Rowlands, an FGS program scientist at the time.

FGS doesn't use color filters like the other science instruments, which means scientists can't determine the age of the galaxies in this image.

NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said that the July 12 release will contain the deepest image of the universe ever captured.

The light spectrum of the imaged objects is captured by the two cameras and two spectrometers that are in the space telescope. The telescope was designed to look for the most distant and oldest stars in the universe. The redshift effect caused by the expansion of the universe causes visible light to shift into the longer wavelength of the telescope, which requires an ultracold telescope.

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