WASHINGTON, Tuesday, July 12, 2022 (WAFA) - NASA said it made history again yesterday when it released the first full-color image of the space from its James Webb Space Telescope.

It's the highest-resolution infrared image ever captured. The new picture is a "deep field" image — a long-exposure observation of a region of the sky, which allows the telescope to capture the light of extremely faint, distant objects.

Because it takes time for light to travel, NASA said, some of the light in the new image is more than 13 billion years old. That's less than 1 billion years after the Big Bang. The telescope has successfully looked back in time.

NASA said the picture taken by Webb’s Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam) is a composite made from images at different wavelengths, totaling 12.5 hours – achieving depths at infrared wavelengths beyond the Hubble Space Telescope’s deepest fields, which took weeks.

The image shows the galaxy cluster SMACS 0723 as it appeared 4.6 billion years ago, according to the American organization.

The combined mass of this galaxy cluster acts as a gravitational lens, magnifying much more distant galaxies behind it, the organization added. Webb’s NIRCam has brought those distant galaxies into sharp focus – they have tiny, faint structures that have never been seen before, including star clusters and diffuse features. 

"Today's a historic day," said President Joe Biden, as he waited to see the image in a White House briefing on Monday evening. "These images are going to remind the world that America can do big things and remind the American people, especially our children, that there's nothing beyond our capacity."

"We can see possibilities no one has ever seen before. We can go places no one has ever gone before."

NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said: "We're going back to about 13 and a half billion years. Since we know the universe is 13.8 billion years old, we're going back almost to the beginning."

M.N