A NASA telescope will soon show us the universe as we've never seen it

An image of some of the first galaxies to form in the universe is expected to be seen later today.

The picture will come from a space telescope. The White House decided that President Biden should reveal the image to the world because it's so dramatic.

It is the most advanced observatory ever launched. Last December, it left Earth. It was a million miles away from the planet. Engineers have been checking out the instruments, aligning the mirrors and cooling the telescope to make sure it works.

The telescope was built to find the first generation of galaxies that formed after the big bang. It was built to do that.

Mission managers wanted to make early release observations before they opened the telescope. These are meant to show that the telescope works and are intended to be powerful both visually and scientifically.

NASA will also release images of a stellar nursery and a group of galaxies discovered in 1787 called Stephan's Quintet. There will be an analysis of the light that comes from a giant planet outside our solar system. There will be more images coming out on Tuesday.

Looking Back To The Beginning

The human eye can only see the shortest wavelength of light known as the human eye. It will be able to see light from the earliest galaxies.

The early galaxies are so far away that they may just look like smudges. Figuring out how the universe came to be will be aided by those smudges.

An astronomer at the University of Texas at Austin is one of the people who will be searching for the earliest stars.

She suggests pointing the telescope at the same patch of sky for a long time and letting the light from distant objects trickle in. The Hubble space telescope was able to identify a lot of previously unseen objects.

We're going to have a million galaxies because Hubble was able to see ten thousand of them.

If you could get a birds eye view of the universe, it would look a lot different.

"If you zoom all the way out, you'll see something like the interior of a sponge, where there are little gaps and voids," he said. The structure is what we want to capture.

Much More To See

There's more to come. There is a lot of science that can be done with Webb. Megan will be studying the atmospheres of planets outside our solar system with the help of the telescope.

She wants to know what their temperature is and what their atmosphere is. It will tell her a lot about the planet and its ability to sustain life.

A team led by Anna Nierenberg of the University of California, Merced is trying to understand the nature of dark matter by using a new telescope. She says that it's impossible to do that with any other instrument. It will be a big deal if everything goes according to plan.

No one knows what secrets the telescope will reveal about the universe.

This report was contributed to byNPR's Nell Greenfieldboyce.