President Joe Biden will unveil the highly anticipated first full-color image from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope on Monday, agency officials confirmed.
The image, known as “Webb’s First Deep Field,” will be the deepest, highest-resolution view of the universe ever captured, showing myriads of galaxies as they appeared 13 billion years ago, according to NASA.
The agency and its partners, the European Space Agency and the Canadian Space Agency, will release a separate batch of full-color images from the Webb telescope on Tuesday, but Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris and the public will get a sneak peek. one day before
NASA will brief the president and vice president on Monday, agency officials said, with the first image to be revealed at a 5 p.m. ET event at the White House.
The $10 billion James Webb Space Telescope is the largest and most powerful space telescope of humanityand experts have said it could revolutionize our understanding of the cosmos.
After event at the White House, NASA will reveal more images at an event broadcast live Tuesday at 10:30 a.m. ET. NASA officials said the batch will include the Webb Telescope’s first spectrum of an exoplanet, showing light emitted at different wavelengths from a planet in another star system. The images could offer new insights into the atmospheres and chemical composition of other exoplanets in the cosmos.
Some images included in Tuesday’s release will show how galaxies interact and grow, and others will depict the life cycle of stars, from the appearance of new ones to violent stellar deaths.
The Webb telescope launched into space on December 25. The tennis-court-sized observatory is capable of peering deeper into the cosmos and in greater detail than any previous telescope.