It acts as a giant cosmic lens, letting JWST zoom in on thousands of even more distant galaxies that shone 13 billion years ago (the redder, more stretched galaxies). Galaxy cluster SMACS 0723 (bluer galaxies) is 4.6 billion light-years from Earth. JWST has captured the deepest views yet of the universe (above). The stunning photos that follow are a few of the early greatest hits from the shiny new observatory. But the pictures themselves are real and reliable, even though it takes some artistry to translate the telescope’s infrared data into colorful visible light ( SN: 3/17/18, p. The raw numbers that scientists have pulled out of some of the initial images may end up being revised slightly. “We knew calibration issues were going to happen,” Mowla says. The JWST team is providing calibration information so researchers can properly analyze the data. Data from the telescope had been in such high demand that the operators hadn’t yet calibrated all the detectors before releasing data. That need for testing plus the excitement has led to some confusion for astronomers in these heady early days. “It will take some time before we can characterize all the different observation modes of all four instruments that are on board.” “It is a very, very new instrument,” says Lamiya Mowla, an astronomer at the University of Toronto. JWST spent its first several months collecting “early-release” science data, observations that test the different ways the telescope can see. And because it looks in much longer wavelengths of light, JWST can observe distant and veiled objects that were previously hidden. It’s bigger and more sensitive than its predecessor, the Hubble Space Telescope. But I think there's a little bit of I hope we thought of everything because there's nothing we can do about it now.The telescope, also known as JWST, was designed to see further back into the history of the cosmos than ever before ( SN: 10/9/21 & 10/23/21, p. Let's see if it works and then you do this, which is probably not the official sign for years. And so what do you do if you're an engineer? Well, you test and you test and you test and you test, and then finally say, Well, I think we've checked it out in as many ways as we can. And as you say, it went through a lot of iterations, a lot of setbacks and a lot of this stuff that had to work exactly properly to unfold it because it had to be folded up to fit inside the rocket that sent it into space. But the other people who are just ecstatic are the engineers because this is a really, really complicated piece of equipment. One are the scientists who have been thinking and planning and hoping and dreaming, and they have been coming up with ideas about how to use this for the last decade or more. Well, there's two groups of people that are over the moon. He didn't build the telescope because he wanted to know if there were moons around Jupiter. He pointed it at Jupiter and suddenly he discovered moons around Jupiter. He didn't know what he was going to find. Like he built the telescope well, he was looking around. They're going to come up with interesting observations, and I was saying the first example of that is Galileo. When you give scientists a new piece of equipment and say, check this out, see what you can do with it. The final thing I'll say about what they're going to find is, they don't know. They didn't design it for that, but now they can use it for that. But the crazy thing is, is that since they conceived of it, people discovered, Oh, there's planets orbiting stars outside our solar system and we could look at those with this telescope. But if you look through an infrared telescope, oh yes, there I see a star or a galaxy. If you're looking at it's like night goggles, you can't see anything. And the reason you need this telescope and not something like the Hubble Space Telescope, is that those distant objects are moving away from us so fast that the light is being stretched out. You know, this thing was built for one purpose or originally conceived of for one purpose, which is to see light from the most distant galaxies and stars.
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