[In Picture] This Is How It Began: The Universe As It Was Almost 13 Billion Years Ago

New Delhi: The image above is a glimpse of the universe as it was almost 13 billion years ago, close to the starting point of the universe itself.

The image, taken by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, was unveiled by US President Joe Biden at a White House event on Tuesday.

“It’s hard to even fathom,” Biden said. “It’s astounding. It’s an historic moment for science and technology, for America and all of humanity.”

NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said the image showed the light of galaxies bending around other galaxies, travelling for billions of years before reaching the telescope. “We are looking back more than 13 billion years,” he said. “We are going back almost to the beginning.”

According to NASA’s website, “James Webb Space Telescope has produced the deepest and sharpest infrared image of the distant universe to date. Known as Webb’s First Deep Field, this image of galaxy cluster SMACS 0723 is overflowing with detail”.

“Thousands of galaxies — including the faintest objects ever observed in the infrared — have appeared in Webb’s view for the first time. This slice of the vast universe covers a patch of sky approximately the size of a grain of sand held at arm’s length by someone on the ground”, NASA said on its website.

James Webb Space Telescope, a joint endeavor of NASA with the European Space Agency (ESA), is the most powerful telescope ever sent into space and is currently about 1 million miles from earth.