WASHINGTON • Star light, star bright, the James Webb Space Telescope has seen its first star - and even taken a selfie, Nasa announced on Friday.
The steps are part of the months-long process of aligning the observatory's enormous golden mirror that astronomers hope will begin unravelling the mysteries of the early universe by this summer.
The first picture sent back of the cosmos is far from stunning: 18 blurry white dots on a black background, all of the same object: HD 84406 a bright, isolated star in the Ursa Major constellation.
But in fact it represents a major milestone. The 18 dots were captured by the primary mirror's 18 individual segments - and the image is now the basis for aligning and focusing those hexagonal pieces.
The light bounced off the segments to Webb's secondary mirror, a round object located at the end of long booms, and then to the Near Infrared Camera (NIRCam) instrument - Webb's main imaging device.
"The entire Webb team is ecstatic at how well the first steps of taking images and aligning the telescope are proceeding," said Professor Marcia Rieke, principal investigator for the NIRCam instrument and regents professor of astronomy, University of Arizona. "We were so happy to see that light make its way into NIRCam."
The image capturing process began on Feb 2, with Webb pointing at different positions around the predicted location of the star.
Though Webb's initial search covered an area of the sky about equal to the size of the full Moon, the dots were all located near the centre portion, meaning the observatory is already relatively well positioned for final alignment.
To aid the process, the team also captured a "selfie" taken not through an externally mounted camera but through a special lens on board NIRCam.
The US$10 billion (S$13 billion) observatory was launched from French Guiana on Dec 25 and is now in an orbit that is aligned with the Earth's around the Sun, 1.5 million kilometres away from our planet, in a region of space called the second Lagrange point.
AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE
