Nasa releases first set of full colour James Webb photos

Nasa released the first complete set of full color images taken by the James Webb Space Telescope, revealing stunning images of distant nebulae, galaxies, and uniquely detailed spectral data from an exoplanet’s atmosphere.

The images were introduced live on Nasa’s website shortly after 10.30am EDT on Tuesday following the release of the very first image Monday night, when US President Joe Biden introduced the first Webb deep field image of some of the faintest galaxies ever imaged in infrared light. The images released Tuesday include Webb’s photos of the Carina and Southern Wheel nebulae, A collection of galaxies known as Stephen’s Quartet and a spectrum of light from the exoplanet WASP-96 b.

The first image shown on Tuesday is the same deep field image first introduced by president Biden Monday evening.

The deep field shows thousands of galaxies, some more than 13.2 billion light years away, magnified by the gravity of a larger galaxy cluster in the foreground, causing the noticeable distortion in the image.

The second image is a spectrum of light from the exoplanet WASP-96 b, information about the chemical make up of that planet made possible by Webb’s infrared spectrometer instrument, according to Nasa astrophysicist Knicole Colon.

“We observed the planet as pit passed in front of a star,” she said. “The starlight filters through the atmosphere and you can break that down into wavelengths of light.”

Those wavelengths show up as “bumps and wiggles,” Dr Colon notes, which in this case indicate the presence of water vapor in the atmosphere of WASP-96 b.