THE SQUIZ
If you heard something yesterday about some funky pictures being sent back from deep space (or, ahem, even read about it in yesterday’s Squiz…) and you nodded along, we’re here for you. An image released yesterday by US President Joe Biden – and more overnight from NASA – are the deepest look at the Universe in infrared ever captured. As Biden said, it shows “light from other worlds, orbiting stars far beyond our own. It’s astounding to me when I read this and saw the – I mean, it really is. It’s, it’s, anyway…”

IT’S A LOT TO GET YOUR HEAD AROUND…
Totally – je suis President Biden… But let’s have a go at decoding the momentous moment:

• Who – the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is named for the guy who ran NASA in the 1960s when it was a baby agency and President Kennedy wanted to put a man on the moon. He’s most closely linked to the Apollo space travel program, but he was also big into space science.

• What – the US$10 billion machine is the biggest/most powerful astronomical observatory to leave Earth, and it’s considered one of humanity’s great engineering achievements. It’s the successor to the Hubble Space Telescope, which was also groundbreaking.

• How – it blasted off in December from French Guiana in South America and reached its lookout point 1.6 million kilometres from Earth in January. Since then, it’s been getting its mirrors aligned, infrared detectors cold enough, and instruments calibrated to operate.

• Why – it has 2 goals: to take pics of the first stars to shine in the Universe about 13.8 billion years ago, and to get a look at planets far, far away to see if they might be habitable. Simples…

GOT IT. SO WHAT DO THE IMAGES SHOW?
Light from soon after the Big Bang, which was 13.8 billion years ago; tightly clustered galaxies; an exoplanet that they reckon has water; and ‘a star is born’ – all from a tiny sliver of the Universe and very exciting to those in the know. So how does light from billions of years ago work? A good explainer is here (scroll down a bit…), but it’s a much grander version of Earth’s relationship to the Sun, where the light we get was emitted 8 minutes ago. “It’s hard to fathom,” Biden said yesterday. It sure is, Mr President…