President Joe Biden will unveil the highly anticipated first full-color image from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope Monday, agency officials confirmed.
The image, known as “Webb’s First Deep Field,” will be the universe’s deepest and highest resolution ever recorded, showing numerous galaxies as they appeared up to 13 billion years in the past, according to NASA.
The agency and its partners, the European Space Agency and the Canadian Space Agency, will release a separate set of color images from the Webb telescope on Tuesday, but Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris and the public will get a sneak peek a day early.
NASA will notify the president and vice president Monday, agency officials said, and the first image will be unveiled at an event at 5 p.m. ET at the White House.
The $10 billion James Webb Space Telescope is humanity’s largest and most powerful space telescope, and experts have said it could revolutionize our understanding of the cosmos.
After the White House event, NASA will reveal more images in an event streamed live Tuesday at 10:30 a.m. ET. NASA officials said that batch will include the first spectrum of an exoplanet from the Webb telescope, showing light emitted at different wavelengths from a planet in another galaxy. The images may provide new insights into the atmospheres and chemical compositions of other exoplanets in the cosmos.
Some images in Tuesday’s release will show how galaxies interact and grow, and others will depict the life cycle of stars, from the appearance of new ones to violent deaths.
The Webb telescope was launched into space on December 25. The tennis court-sized observatory can look deeper and in greater detail into the cosmos than any telescope.