Next week, NASA will release the first images from the James Webb Telescope, an instrument that can peer back into the beginnings of the Universe.
The US$10 billion observatory, launched in December last year and now circling the Sun a million miles away from Earth, is able to see through dust and gas thanks to its enormous primary mirror and instruments.
The first fully formed pictures will be released on July 12 and NASA provided an engineering test photo on Wednesday showing a set of distant stars.
NASA said in a statement that the image has some rough-around-the-edges qualities, but is still among the deepest images of the universe ever taken.
"When this image was taken, I was thrilled to see all the detailed structure in these faint galaxies," said Neil.
The blobs in the image are the types of faint galaxies that will be studied by the telescope in its first year of operations.
The engineering test image. (NASA, CSA, and FGS team)
Nelson said last week that the telescope is able to look further into the universe than any other telescope before it.
He said that it will explore objects in the solar system and atmospheres of exoplanets, giving us clues as to whether their atmospheres are similar to our own.
We have some questions about where we come from. There is more to come. We are not sure who we are. It will answer some questions that we don't know what they are.
It is possible for it to see back in time to when the Big bang happened.
Because the Universe is expanding, the light from the earliest stars is no longer in the visible and ultraviolet wavelength, but in the longer wavelength of theIR.
Astronomers think they will easily break the record for the earliest observations of the Big Bang, which was 330 million years ago.
Agence France- Presse.
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