The American Space Agency (Nasa) has announced that it will unveil, on July 12, the “deepest” image of the universe, taken thanks to its new James Webb space telescope.
NASA will unveil on July 12 “the deepest image ever taken of our universe. It’s farther than anything humanity has looked at before,” US agency boss Bill Nelson said Wednesday at a press conference at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, home to the center of operations for this engineering masterpiece.
Launched last December, the $10 billion James Webb, now 1.5 million kilometers from Earth, is able to look farther into the cosmos than any telescope before it, thanks to its huge main mirror and its instruments perceiving infrared signals, which allows it to peer into space through clouds of dust.
“It will explore solar system objects and the atmospheres of exoplanets orbiting other stars, giving us clues as to whether those atmospheres are potentially similar to our own,” Nelson said.
“This may answer some of our questions: where do we come from? What else is there? Who are we ? And of course, it will answer questions we don’t even know yet. “, he considered. NASA also intends to make public on this occasion the first spectroscopy of the James Webb telescope of a distant planet, an exoplanet.
Spectroscopy is a tool that makes it possible to know the chemical and molecular composition of distant objects and, in the case of a planet, to determine the elements of its atmosphere, to detect the presence of water or to analyze its soil.
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