The most powerful space observatory ever built was shared by NASA on July 12.
The image known as the first deep field was among the close-ups of the Cosmic cliffs. The picture has been described as the deepest image of the universe ever taken.
It is a large amount to take in.
Scott Gaudi, a professor of astronomy at Ohio State University, told Live Science that you can see there is no blank sky. There is something crazy going on.
We asked Gaudi to walk us through the big, small and strange details of the deep field to try and understand it a bit better.
The first images from the James Webb Space Telescope are amazing.
The center of the image is a huge group of stars.
A large, bright cluster of galaxies known as SMACS 0723 is the focal point of the deep field image. There are bright spots of light at the center of the picture, surrounded by a white halo of starlight.
One of the largest structures in the universe is a galaxy cluster. There are bright spots of light at the center of the image that represent some of the larger galaxies.
There is a hot mess when the universe collides. A lot of star forming gas crash, compress and heat up, forming countless new stars that "spew out" of the colliding galaxies.
A white haze is created by stars that are not bound to any of the galaxies within the cluster.
The evidence of a long-held theory that galaxy clusters store a good chunk of their mass in the inter-cluster regions has been added to.
SMACS-0723 is a good target because it is so massive, it warps the light of stars and galaxies located billions of light years behind it. The next feature of the deep field image is called gravitational lensing.
The worm-shaped arcs that are coming from the center of the image are probably the next thing that will catch your eye. Behind the foreground cluster, there are background galaxies. When their light hits the cluster, the mass bends that light and makes a lens.
A space telescope will study a black hole.
The combination of a magnifying glass and a funhouse mirror warps and magnifies the light from the background. Two background galaxies sit between 2 and 3 o'clock, and 7 and 9 o'clock, if you imagine the center of this image as a clock.
The central galaxy cluster has lines that wrap around it. Their light is being magnified so much that they seem very long. The galaxies are more than 13 billion light-years away, which is1-65561-6556 and1-65561-65561-65561-6556.
The central cluster is doubling the ancient objects. The orange lines are brighter around the edges and dimmer at the center. You can see that the two bright areas are actually mirror images of each other by looking closer.
The object on display here has a mirror image somewhere else in the field.
NASA wants to study the oldest light in the universe. The powerful telescope cannot look back in time without thousands of younger, closer galaxies photo-bombing the frame.
Stars are the big, bright, six-pointed objects in the foreground of the picture. A cluster of galaxies is almost all you can see.
There are two major types of galaxies. You can see a perfect spiral galaxy if you look right of the bright star at the center of the picture. The spiral galaxies are filled with hotter, younger stars that glow in the light.
There is a fiery orange elliptical galaxy to the left of that spiral.
The elliptical galaxies are no longer alive. All of their stars have been formed. You are left with the old red stars after the blue stars die off.
The younger spiral galaxies are the ones in this image.
A phenomenon called redshift can change the color of a galaxy if it is far away from the telescope. Light increases in wavelength as it travels across the vast and expanding universe. Some of the red and orange galaxies in this image are ancient background galaxies whose light has been redshifted.
One of the exciting challenges awaiting scientists is estimating the ages of the thousands of objects in this image. The deeper the field, the more strange and wonderful it will be.
An orange N-shaped galaxy zigzagging just to the right of the perfect spiral galaxy was indicated by Gaudi. This was dubbed the "merger train wreck galaxy" by Gaudi.
The discoveries have only just begun, with the first images just days old, and more than 20 years of fuel waiting aboard theJWST. We hope you enjoy the experience.
It was originally published on Live Science
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