SAN FRANCISCO (KCBS RADIO) – NASA on Tuesday morning unveiled additional eye-popping pictures from the new James Webb Space Telescope – the agency's largest and most powerful telescope ever launched into space.
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NASA and the White House revealed the telescope's first image on Monday, which officials called "the deepest and sharpest infrared image of the distant universe so far." The photo displays a galaxy cluster called "SMACS 0723" as it appeared 4.6 billion years ago.
It contains thousands of galaxies in a tiny sliver of the universe, approximately the size of a grain of sand held at arm's length.
The agency on Tuesday completed the series of Webb's full-color images and data by revealing four more stunning cosmic pictures – a release which was met by cheers from a crowd of engineers and scientists at Lockheed Martin Advanced Technology Center in Palo Alto.
The center spent nearly 12 years building and designing NIRCam – Near Infrared Camera – the instrument on the James Webb Space Telescope which took some of the stupendous pictures.
The first image revealed Tuesday, called WASP-96 b, shows the "distinct signature of water, along with evidence for clouds and haze, in the atmosphere surrounding a hot, puffy gas giant planet orbiting a distant Sun-like star," according to a release.
The next photo captured the Southern Ring Nebula, approximately 2,500 light years away. It shows a dimming star that has sent out rings of gas and dust for thousands of years in all directions.
The third image released by the agency, the telescope's largest to date, is called Stephan's Quintet, a visual grouping of five galaxies, best known for being prominently featured in the famed holiday film “It's a Wonderful Life.” The new picture reveals it in "a new light," with over 150 million pixels, constructed from almost 1,000 separate image files, and with never before seen details.
"Sparkling clusters of millions of young stars and starburst regions of fresh star birth grace the image," officials said.
Lastly, NASA unveiled a photo of the edge of a star forming region called NGC 3324 in the Carina Nebula. The image displays previously invisible areas of star birth. Officials called the brown colored peaks and valleys "Cosmic Cliffs," which have been "carved from the nebula by the intense ultraviolet radiation and stellar winds from extremely massive, hot, young stars located in the center of the bubble."
"The images are beautiful, they are exciting, they are inspirational. But this is just the beginning of the work," Nelson Pedreiro, Vice President of the Center, told KCBS Radio. "Now how do we extract additional information about these images, so that we can really understand what they're telling us and all these features. That's really when the real work begins."
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