This Brilliant New Photo Is Just a Taste of the Power of NASA’s New Space Telescope
The $10 billion James Webb Space Telescope, launched in late 2021, was hyped as the most revolutionary space instrument the modern world has ever seen, poised to send back snaps of the universe rivaling its predecessor, the Hubble Space Telescope. It looks like JWST is already delivering on that promise—and it has the visuals to prove it.
NASA officials announced on March 16 that JWST reached its goal of aligning its 21-foot, 4-inch hexagon-shaped mirror and Near-Infrared Camera, successfully focusing on a distant star. This alignment is crucial to the telescope being able to collect and focus light cleanly to take pictures of faraway celestial bodies and other strange cosmic phenomena.
The star JWST captured is pretty ordinary with an extraordinarily long name—2MASS J17554042+6551277. But the image itself is exquisite, showing a brilliant reddish flash (enhanced with a filter) with pinpricks of starlight emanating out into the void of space.
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