There is also the European Space Agency (ESA), which participated in the James Webb Space Telescope project, earlierSelected the image above to share with the public. The direction of the photo was taken somewhere in the constellation of Hercules, and only a very few points of light in the picture are stars (points of light with stars), and basically every other small point of light is a distant galaxy, There could be as many as thousands of galaxies in the entire picture. Visible at the bottom of the image is a spiral galaxy called LEDA 2046648, estimated to be a billion light-years away from Earth, while other background orange galaxies are farther away.
This photo was actually taken on May 22 last year, when Webb was still in the process of calibrating the instrument. The reason why the lens is facing this direction is to allow Webb’s near-infrared camera (NIRCam) to take pictures of the white dwarf star WD1657+343 for correction, and this photo is actually the background taken “by the way” during the correction process.
Astronomers will be able to take such pictures and compare them with today’s galaxies to understand the differences in their shape, structure, and even chemical composition, so as to understand how the galaxies looked different in the past and how the galaxies may have evolved. .