JAMES WEBB SPACE TELESCOPE SHOWS US THE UNIVERSE IN A NEW LIGHT

These images will kick-start a new era in space exploration

- DR KATIE MACK

On my phone is a slightly blurry photo of a distant, unnamed galaxy. It's a little white smudge with spiral arms like sheep's wool fluff-one galaxy among thousands of others in the James Webb Space Telescope's (JWST) new breathtakingly detailed image of the distant cosmos and I can't stop staring at it. There is nothing especially remarkable about this little white swirl; it's not the largest or sharpest or most perfectly rendered or in any way most interesting galaxy in the image. But before JWST, no human had ever really seen it. I am seeing it now, fully and completely, and it is beautiful.

JWST is going to show us a lot of things we've never seen before. The selection of images (and one spectrum) in the telescope's science image debut were chosen to showcase all the ways in which this project will change our view and understanding fundamentally of the Universe.

The first picture to be released, in a special presentation with US President Joe Biden on Monday night, brought us a giant galaxy cluster embedded in a skyscape scattered with enough distant background galaxies including my own tiny spiral - to rival the deepest of the Hubble Deep Fields. What took Hubble a week and a half, JWST did "before breakfast", according to Dr Jane Rigby, JWST's operations project scientist.