Pointers at Glance
- President Biden shared the first image of the universe taken from the Webb space telescope from NASA.
- He praised NASA for its work and the imagery the telescope will produce further.
- NASA chief Nelson said that we are going to be able to answer questions that we don’t even know what the questions are yet, and the technology could determine whether other planets are habitable.
President Biden unveiled an image that NASA and astronomers hailed as the deepest view yet into our universe’s past in an event at the White House on Monday evening. The image was taken by the James Webb Space Telescope, which is the largest space telescope. It showed a distant patch of sky in which fledgling galaxies were burning their way into visibility just 600 million years after the Big Bang.
Biden said that this is the oldest documented light in the universe’s history, around 13 billion years ago. He praised NASA for its work that enabled the telescope and the imagery it will produce and apologized for starting the event at a slow pace.
He added that we can see possibilities no one has ever seen before, and we can go to places no one has ever gone before.
Words by NASA Chief, Nelson
The NASA chief, Nelson, touted the scientific potential of the telescope at the White House event. He said that we are going to be able to answer questions that we don’t even know what the questions are yet. When Nelson said that the technology could determine whether other planets were habitable, Biden responded with a “Whoa.”
The most ambitious mission of the Webb telescope is to study some of the first stars and galaxies that lit up the universe soon after the Big Bang 14 billion years ago. Though Monday’s snapshot might not have reached that far, it proved the principle of the technique and hinted at what more is to come from the telescope’s scientific instruments, which astronomers have held back for decades to bring online.
Priyamvada Natarajan from Yale University, an expert on black holes and ancient galaxies, said that we would see out to the edge of the universe like never before as the telescope gathers more data in the upcoming years. She added, “It is beyond my wildest imagination to be alive when we get to see out to the edge of black holes and the edge of the universe.”
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