Engineers at ATC designed, assembled and tested NIRCam, the primary imager aboard the Webb telescope.

(Karl Mondon/Bay Area News Group) PALO ALTO, CALIFORNIA – JULY 12: Ariana Reyes, an engineer at Lockheed Martin’s Advanced Technology Center in Palo Alto, Calif., watches as NASA reveals the first images of the James Webb Space Telescope, Tuesday, July 12, 2022. PALO ALTO, CALIFORNIA – JULY 12: Members of Lockheed Martin’s Advanced Technology Center in Palo Alto, Calif., watch as NASA reveals the first images of the James Webb Space Telescope, Tuesday, July 12, 2022. Watch NASA’s presentation here as more images are are to be revealed at 9:30 a.m. This period of very early star formation is difficult to capture because, for an individual star, it lasts only about 50,000 to 100,000 years – but Webb’s extreme sensitivity and exquisite spatial resolution have chronicled this rare event. An unusual “arch” appears, looking like a bent-over cylinder.A “blow-out” erupts at the top-center of the ridge, spewing gas and dust into the interstellar medium.

Protostellar jets and outflows, which appear in gold, shoot from dust-enshrouded, nascent stars.Bubbles and cavities are being blown by the intense radiation and stellar winds of newborn stars.Dramatic pillars rise above the glowing wall of gas, resisting the blistering ultraviolet radiation from the young stars.The ‘steam’ that appears to rise from the celestial ‘mountains’ is actually hot, ionized gas and hot dust streaming away from the nebula due to intense, ultraviolet radiation.The cavernous area has been carved from the nebula by the intense ultraviolet radiation and stellar winds from extremely massive, hot, young stars located in the center of the bubble, above the area shown in this image. In reality, it is the edge of the giant, gaseous cavity within NGC 3324, and the tallest ‘peaks’ in this image are about 7 light-years high. Captured in infrared light, this image reveals for the first time previously invisible areas of star birth.Ĭalled the Cosmic Cliffs, Webb’s seemingly three-dimensional picture looks like craggy mountains on a moonlit evening. The space agency captioned the photo above: “This landscape of ‘mountains’ and ‘valleys’ speckled with glittering stars is actually the edge of a nearby, young, star-forming region called NGC 3324 in the Carina Nebula. Lights, camera, action: Webb telescope’s galactic images from edge of universe begin to beam to the world

Ancient space