This week, NASA revealed for the first time five pictures taken by the James Webb Space Telescope. Together, these images—from the birth of stars to one of the deepest looks into the far reaches of space—offer some of the most detailed glimpses into the beginnings of our universe ever seen.
Here’s what each image shows and why it helps us better understand space:
SMACS 0723
Webb’s cameras can look deep into space and far into the past. Webb has the capacity to look 13.6 billion light years distant—which will be the farthest we’ve ever seen into space. This image of the galactic cluster known as SMACS 0723 contains thousands of galaxies, some of which are as far away as 13.1 billion light years. (A single light year is just under 6 trillion miles.) Since light takes a long time to travel so far, we are seeing the galaxies not as they look today, but as they looked 13.1 billion years ago. The bluer galaxies are more mature ones, containing many stars and little dust. The redder galaxies contain more dust, from which stars are still forming.
Carina Nebula
Stars, like the rest of us, are born, age, and die, and the Carina Nebula, located 7,600 light years from Earth, is one of the cosmos’s great stellar nurseries. The formations that look like cliffs are vast peaks of dust and gas, some as tall as seven light years. The Hubble Space Telescope has imaged Carina before, but never in the dazzling detail Webb has provided. Young stars are being born in this turbulent region, coalescing out of the surrounding material. As the stars form, they give off enormous amounts of energy that help give the overall nebula its shape. Red dots in the image are jets of energy being emitted by the growing, infant stars.
Stephan’s Quintet
Webb captured the greatest image ever taken of Stephan’s Quintet, a cluster of five galaxies, first seen by astronomers in 1877. The quintet is actually more of a quartet, with the leftmost galaxy located in the foreground, 40 million light years from Earth, while the other four are located a far more distant 290 million light years away. The four closely packed galaxies interact, with dust and stars gravitationally pulled from one to another—commingling their material. Clusters of young…
Read More: What The 5 James Webb Space Telescope Pictures Tell Us