The universe was born in darkness almost 13 billion years ago, and even after the first stars and galaxies were born, they stayed dark. Their brilliant light, stretched by time and the expanding cosmos, dimmed into theIR, rendering them and other clues to our beginnings impossible to see.
It has been this way until now. The most powerful space observatory yet built offered a spectacular slide-show of our previously invisible universe on Tuesday. The sky is covered in ancient galaxies. Stars shine out from the clouds of dust. There are hints of water in the air.
The sum is a new vision of the universe and a view of the universe that used to be new.
The operations manager of the telescope said that it was always there. We built a telescope to look at what was there.
The vaunted successor to the Hubble Space Telescope, 30 years and nearly $10 billion in the making, is equipped to access this realm of Cosmic History, study the first stars and galaxies and look for nearer, potentially habitable worlds. The European Space Agency and the Canadian Space Agency collaborated with NASA.
John Mather is the senior project scientist for the telescope.
President Biden gave a preview on Monday afternoon when he introduced the deepest image yet taken of the universe, a mark that will probably be passed before the week is over.
The image of a distant star cluster showed the presence of many more distant galaxies. The light from those galaxies was magnified into view by the field of the cluster.
Peer into the past to look out into space. Light travels at a constant rate of 186,000 miles per second through space. When the light left the star's surface, you can see it as it was ten years ago. The older a star is, the harder it is to see.
The earliest stars may be different from the stars we see today. The first stars were composed of pure hydrogen and helium left over from the Bigbang, and they could grow to be much larger than the sun.
The new pictures were rolled out during an hourlong ceremony at the Goddard Space Flight Center that was hosted byMichelle Thaller, the center's assistant director for science communication. At the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, there was an overflow crowd of people whooped and yelled, oohed and ahs, as the new images on the screen showed that their telescope was working better than expected.
The skyscape showed five galaxies in the constellation. Four seem to be very close together. The image showed a band of dust that was being heated up by two of the galaxies.
Polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, or PAHs, can be seen in the remains of an exploded star. New stars, planets, asteroids, and whatever life might follow, can be formed by such molecule drifting through space.
The formation of PAHs in the stars is an important part of how life got started, according to an astronomer. "I'm gobsmacked."
The most striking image was of the Carina nebula, a vast, swirling cloud of dust that is both a star nursery and home to some of the most exciting stars in the universe. The nebula looked like a cliff of stars that had never been seen before.
The deputy project scientist for the telescope took a long time to figure out what to say in the image.
She couldn't help but think about the scale of the nebula, full of stars with planets of their own.
Humans are connected to the universe. The landscape makes us out of the same things.
There was relief and praise from all over the world.
Alan Dressler was an astronomer at the Carnegie Observatory who was instrumental in planning for the telescope 30 years ago. I think I'm not as tired as I thought.
He said that the growth in our understanding of the universe will be the same as it was with the Hubble. We are in for a great ride.
Sara Seager, a planetary scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said that people cried when they first saw the images. I feel sad.
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