The most powerful telescope in history.
The James Webb Space Telescope's "jewel-filled" photos are stunning.
The James Webb Space Telescope's "jewel-filled" photos are stunning.
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00:00From the birthing places of baby stars, to a dying star's dramatic death rose,
00:05from an image of five galaxies locked in an endless cosmic ballet,
00:09to a view of the cosmos that's so deep, it takes us back to the very beginnings of galaxies themselves.
00:16The James Webb Space Telescope's first ever images are here, and they're absolutely mind-melting.
00:22The five new full-colour photos, released by NASA this week as test images of the brand-new James Webb Space Telescope,
00:34show our universe in unprecedented, breathtaking detail.
00:39NASA has said they're only the beginning.
00:42The $10 billion telescope, designed as a replacement to the Hubble Space Telescope,
00:48is a hundred times more powerful than its predecessor,
00:51and able to take highly detailed snapshots of our universe in a matter of days.
00:56The telescope was launched into space on Christmas Day, and spent six months calibrating its instruments,
01:03and unfurling its 21-foot-wide, gold-plated primary mirror.
01:08Since coming online, the James Webb has been taking all kinds of test images
01:13in preparation for its planned two decades of service studying our cosmos.
01:19NASA has released five of those test images this week,
01:22all specially chosen to show how the telescope can help astronomers discover more about our cosmos.
01:30First on the list is Stéphane's Quintet,
01:33a group of five tightly-bound galaxies located 290 million light-years away.
01:40Four of these galaxies are constantly circling around each other,
01:44locked in a cosmic dance of repeated close encounters.
01:49Scientists hope that by studying this dancing quintet,
01:52they could gain some insights into dark matter,
01:56the mysterious substance believed to make up most of the universe's matter.
02:01Next is this image of the Carina Nebula,
02:05a dust and gas cloud 7,600 light-years from Earth,
02:10and one of the brightest and most active star-forming regions ever discovered.
02:15It is home to many stars much larger than our Sun,
02:19making it an attractive place to look for clues into the beginnings of our solar system,
02:23as well as its dramatic finale.
02:27On the subject of dying stars, the third image in NASA's teaser is the Southern Ring Nebula,
02:33also known as the Ape Burst for its figure-eight appearance.
02:37Positioned around 2,000 light-years from Earth,
02:40the nebula is an expanding cloud of gas and dust,
02:43spewed out by the death throes of a red dwarf star.
02:47As the nebula's dust particles are particularly rich in heavy elements such as carbon,
02:52these remnants could one day go on to form new stars and planets,
02:57giving us a fascinating peek into the cosmic cycle of death and rebirth.
03:03The fourth snapshot wasn't so much an image,
03:06but the first full colour spectrum of WASP-96b,
03:10a giant, mostly gaseous exoplanet that's half the mass of Jupiter
03:15and is located nearly 1,150 light-years from Earth.
03:20First discovered in 2014, WASP-96b is so close to its Sun
03:24that a single orbit takes just 3.4 Earth days.
03:28By studying the way light is absorbed and re-emitted by this planet's atmosphere,
03:32the web was able to detect water vapour.
03:35If scientists can spot molecules like methane or carbon dioxide on other planets,
03:40they could use it as a way to hunt for life beyond our solar system.
03:45And we've saved the best till last.
03:48This image, called the web's first deep field,
03:51shows a cluster of galaxies with a combined gravity that is so strong
03:55they act as a gigantic magnifying lens,
03:58warping and concentrating distant starlight in an effect called gravitational lensing.
04:03This doesn't just enable us to see deeper into the universe,
04:06but, because light travels at a fixed speed,
04:09allows us to detect older light emitted further back in the universe's past,
04:14an optical time machine through which we can glimpse the faintest glimmerings of starlight
04:18from the first ever galaxies.
04:21Now, if none of this has melted your brain so far,
04:24every light source in this image that doesn't have the characteristic diffraction spikes of a star
04:29is a galaxy, and each galaxy here contains billions of stars and trillions of worlds.
04:35All of this is contained within an image that is just the tiniest slice of sky,
04:39the equivalent of holding a sand grain up at arm's length.
04:43And for all the unprecedented and staggering depth in this image,
04:47it took the James Webb just 12 and a half hours to capture it.
04:51And these images are just the beginning.
04:53Now that the telescope is in operation,
04:55scientists from all over the world will be using it to explore space
04:58like it has never been explored before.
05:01We don't know yet what the James Webb Space Telescope will teach us,
05:04but one thing we do know for certain is that our understanding of our universe
05:08is about to be changed forever.
05:17NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology