NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has made a groundbreaking discovery, revealing the deepest-ever view of the universe with its 100-hour reexamination of Hubble’s iconic extragalactic image, the Hubble Ultra Deep Field. The telescope’s observations have uncovered nearly 2,500 new objects, many dating back to the earliest periods of the universe.
The James Webb Space Telescope observed a region near the Big Dipper in the night sky, which was previously imaged by NASA’s Hubble space telescope in 2004. The original image captured 10,000 galaxies, but JWST has now found even more distant objects using its Mid-Infrared Instrument and Near-Infrared Camera.
The new image, named the MIRI Deep Imaging Survey (MIDIS), is a mid-infrared composite of 800 images taken over 11 days. It reveals hundreds of extremely red galaxies that may be less than a billion years old after the Big Bang. These objects are too faint to be detected by human eyes and require specialized filters to process.
The image also shows previously unseen regions of dust and old, red stars. The researchers used a unique filtering system that assigns different colors to each wavelength of light, allowing them to distinguish between galaxies rich in dust, compact galaxies, and bright near-infrared objects.
This discovery is a significant milestone in the field of astronomy, providing new insights into the earliest periods of the universe.
Source: https://www.livescience.com/space/astronomy/james-webb-telescope-captures-one-of-the-deepest-ever-views-of-the-universe-space-photo-of-the-week