NASA publishes the deepest images of the universe ever

Over the past two days, the US space agency NASA has published the deepest images of the universe ever, showing galaxies that formed shortly after the Big Bang, more than 13 billion years ago. These images taken by the James Webb Telescope mark the beginning of a new era in astronomy, which scientists have been waiting for for many years.

The images show two nebulae (two groups of celestial bodies) that show the life cycle of stars, a planet outside the solar system, and a compact group of galaxies. “Every picture is a new discovery,” said Bill Nelson, the head of the US Space Agency, adding that every shot “will give humanity a view of the universe like we’ve never seen it before.”

Among the published images are two nebulae with two clouds of space gas and dust. The first nebula (I called it Carina) is located 7600 light-years away, and it embodies the formation of stars, and it includes large clumps of them, and its size exceeds several times the size of the Sun. The second is the “Southern Ring” nebula, which is called the planetary, although there is no connection between it and the planets, and it is a cloud of gas around a dying star. The images also show the “Stefan Pentagram”, a group of galaxies interacting with each other.

And specialized researchers received these images with great joy, as they reveal for the first time the deepest images of the early universe. While previous spectroscopic analyzes of exoplanets used tools that were considered “revolutionary” at the time, these tools have become very limited, compared to what the James Webb Telescope can do, according to Ashraf Shaker, head of the Astronomy Department at the National Institute for Astronomical and Geophysical Research in Egypt. Shaker told Asharq Al-Awsat: “The history of science before (Monday) was divided into two phases, the first before ascending to the moon, and the second after ascending to the moon. Where the communications and information revolution took place, but without exaggeration, we may be after the image of the James Webb telescope, on the cusp of a new history that divides science into two phases, which are before and after the telescope.”