NASA on Monday unveiled the first image from its James Webb Space Telescope, which shows a first-of-its-kind infrared image so distant in the cosmos that it shows stars and galaxies as they appeared 13 billion years ago.
US President Joe Biden revealed the new image at the White House alongside NASA Administrator Bill Nelson. Dubbed "Webb's First Deep Field," it is the first full-color image from the $10 billion observatory that launched into space last year, and the highest-resolution infrared view of the universe yet captured.
The image offers a glimpse of the universe as it was 13 billion years ago.
An NBC News report noted that telescopes essentially function as time machines because it takes time for light to travel through space.
As such, light that reaches the Webb telescope from the most distant galaxies in the universe does not show present conditions but rather provide insights into how the universe was billions of years ago.
NASA is set to release more images from the Webb telescope in a separate event on Tuesday, including the observatory's first spectrum of an exoplanet, showing light emitted at different wavelengths from a planet in another star system.
The James Webb Space Telescope is a collaboration between NASA, the European Space Agency and the Canadian Space Agency.