I admit I have to practice self control not to start using exclamation points after looking at the picture SMACS 0723, the first image captured by James Webb, just shared by NASA. We already told you this afternoon that this weekend it was decided to postpone the presentation of the first of the five announced films, which will feature Joe Biden, the President of the United States, Kamala Harris, the Vice President of the United States and Bill Nelson, the administrator of NASA.

About an hour late, but the presentation has already taken place and NASA has shared on its website and on its social networks the first final image captured by James Webb, which shows us the never-before-seen image of SMACS 0723. a distant massive cluster or superclusterwhich, thanks to its enormous gravitational field, generates a distortion in the light of the objects behind it, as you can see with some of the captured objects, which give the impression that the camera rotated around its own axis during the capture. picture.

This image of SMACS 0723 it was captured by a near infrared camera (NIRCam, abbreviation in English) by James Webb and is actually a composition made up of images in different wavelengths, with a total of 12.5 hours of exposureand offers an unprecedented level of detail, anticipating what we can expect from this new and fascinating space telescope.

Looking at space-time, the image shows the galaxy cluster SMACS 0723 what it looked like 4.6 billion years ago, but James Webb’s limit isn’t there. If Hubble was able to capture the lights that were generated 13,000 million years ago, when the universe was about 800 million years old, James Webb’s capture systems will allow us to get a little closer to the origin of the universe. than between 100 and 250 million years after the big bang.

The very release of this image of SMACS 0723 has already sparked a lot of conversation on social networks, in which gravitational lensing is the clear protagonist, although the sheer number of galaxies we can see in the shot has also sparked a lot of reactions. . The rest of the pictures will be posted tomorrow, Tuesdaywhich we tell you here, and of course tell you everything you need to know about them.

Image: NASA