The first image from the Webb Telescope is distorted and psychedelic. That’s why.

In the first image released by NASA from the Webb Telescope, some galaxies look like strings from the stretched iris.

This is because the universe itself has changed our view of deep space.

Astronomers recently pointed the Colossal James Webb Space Telescope at a galaxy cluster called SMACS 0723. Most importantly, galaxies are extremely massive objects, containing hundreds of billions of stars, millions of black holes, and perhaps trillions of planets. The combined mass of these galaxies warps space like a bowling ball placed on a mattress.

This warped space essentially creates a “lens” through which we look. So the light from the galaxies behind this galaxy cluster that we (or the Webb Telescope) end up seeing is distorted. This is a phenomenon called “gravitational lensing”. As the Space Telescope Science Institute (which operates the telescope) explains, “It’s like having a camera lens between us and the more distant galaxies.”

SEE ALSO: James Webb Telescope’s first stunning space images are here

Albert Einstein predicted the gravitational lensing effect more than a century ago. Some of the galaxies we can see below in Webb’s first deep look at the cosmos have then been magnified, and some have been deeply stretched or distorted.

“They have been magnified by the cluster’s gravity, just as Einstein said they would,” NASA astrophysicist Jane Rigby said at the unveiling of Webb’s first science images.

NASA calls this image “Webb’s First Deep Field.” This is an image of the galaxy cluster “SMACS 0723.” The mass of galaxies distorts and magnifies more distant galaxies in the background Credit: NASA / ESA / CSA / STScI

In the image above, the cluster of white-looking ethereal galaxies is about 4.6 billion years old. They formed around the same time as the sun and Earth, Rigby said. It is these white galaxies that magnify and change the view from behind.

These more distant objects, which include both red dots and strangely distorted galaxies, are among the oldest objects in the cosmos. “All of the super-faint, dark-red tiny dots, as well as many of the brighter odd-shaped objects in this stunning image, are extremely distant galaxies that the human eye has never seen before,” Harald Ebeling, an astronomer at the University of Hawaii Institute for Astronomy, said. said in a statement.

The faintest objects in this Webb image are about 13.1 billion years old, Rigby said. Yet Webb will soon look even further into the past, more than 13.5 billion years ago, soon after the first stars and galaxies formed.

The Deep Space Observatory

The Webb Telescope – a collaboration between NASA, the European Space Agency and the Canadian Space Agency – is designed to make unprecedented discoveries. “With this telescope, it’s really hard not to break records,” Thomas Zurbuchen, an astrophysicist and NASA’s associate administrator for the agency’s Science Mission Directorate, told a news conference recently.

Here’s how Webb will achieve unparalleled things:

• Giant mirror: Webb’s light-catching mirror is over 21 feet in diameter. That’s over two and a half times the size of the Hubble Space Telescope’s mirror. Capturing more light allows Webb to see more distant, ancient objects.

  “We’re going to see the first stars and galaxies that ever formed,” Jean Creighton, astronomer and director of the Manfred Olson Planetarium at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, told Mashable last year.

• Infrared view: Unlike Hubble, which sees largely the light that is visible to us, Webb is primarily an infrared telescope, meaning it sees light in the infrared spectrum. This allows us to see much more of the universe. Infrared has longer wavelengths than visible light, so light waves more efficiently pass through cosmic clouds; light does not collide as often and is not scattered by these tightly packed particles. After all, Webb’s infrared vision can penetrate where Hubble can’t.

  “It lifts the veil,” Creighton said.

• A Peek at Distant Exoplanets: The Webb Telescope carries specialized equipment called spectrometers, which will revolutionize our understanding of these distant worlds. The instruments can decipher what molecules (such as water, carbon dioxide, and methane) exist in the atmospheres of distant exoplanets—be they gas giants or smaller rocky worlds. Webb will look at exoplanets in the Milky Way galaxy. Who knows what we’ll find.

  “We might learn things we never thought about,” Mercedes Lopez-Morales, an exoplanet researcher and astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, told Mashable in 2021.