Presented to the White House by the American President, Joe Biden, this first photo illustrates the performance of the successor to the Hubble telescope, who, by tracking infrared light, can notably observe the early times of the universe.
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The curtain finally rises on the sky seen by the James-Webb space telescope. After more than twenty-five years of waiting, multiple reports and budgetary slippages, the earthlings have this new piercing eye to scrutinize the cosmos. Monday, July 11, the eyelid was raised by American president Joe Biden himself, revealing the first image of the JWST (his English acronym), built by NASA, the European Space Agency (ESA) and their Canadian counterpart (ASC ). New shots will be unveiled Tuesday July 12 afternoon.
“A historic day”, praised Joe Biden by applauding the arrival of the image on a screen. This first image is a fireworks of more or less wide light spots, more or less brilliant and in various colors, with sometimes shiny fine arcs striving the black sky. These tens, even hundreds of bursts are all galaxies populating the universe. Unheard of in such a small square space, equivalent to the size of a grain of sand at the end of the arm. If a slight impression of blur can surprise, this shot testifies to the success of the telescope with a giant mirror 6.5 meters in diameter, launched at Christmas 2021, now posted at 1.5 million kilometers from the earth and fully operational.
The instrument confirms that it is a great time machine. Until the origins of the Big Bang, tracking down a trembling light which took more than 13 billion years to reach us. “This is the first objective of the telescope, probe the dawn of times, the origin of the stars and galaxies a few tens of millions of years after the Big Bang,” summarizes David Elbaz, researcher at the Atomic Energy Commissariat and alternative energies (CEA).
“It’s fantastic! It’s really very very rich. Colleagues admitted to me having had tears in my eyes when I saw this first image,” says Johan Richard, astronomer at the astrophysical research center of the observatory From Lyon, delighted with this first symbolic choice. “It is a pleasure to see these first images, and now we can start to dream,” greets Nicole Nesvadba, research director at the National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS), at the Côte d’Azur Observatory. “The level of detail is breathtaking. We will really see the universe differently. I look forward to other images,” says Olivier Berné, CNRS researcher at the Astrophysics and Planetology Research Institute in Toulouse.
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