(NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI/Handout via Xinhua) This image released by NASA on July 12 shows a composite image of the Cosmic Cliffs in the Carina Nebula, created with James Webb Space Telescope's NIRCam and MIRI. The younger, brighter star in the pair emits less material than the older one, which unbalances the orbital dance that stirs the nebular cloud into its asymmetrical shape. Previous images of the Southern Ring nebula indicated just one star at its center, but a new image reveals two old stars expelling dust and gas that form the nebula around them. The Webb telescope not only captures the birth of stars, but also their last dances. The image of the Carina Nebula provides a look at a stellar nursery, an area where stars coalesce out of gas and dust and then emit energy that shaves away the nebula itself, making its walls appear like jagged cliffs - only they extend for some seven light-years. When we look at the cosmos in its infancy, we see the universe billions of years before humans were a glimmer in the universe's eye, back when any number of events could have altered the emergence of life on Earth. It's difficult for humans to wrap their heads around the significance of glimpsing the beginning of everything. One galaxy is over 13 billion light-years away, which means that the Webb image shows us what it may have looked like soon after the Big Bang. The telescope’s cameras see so far into space that they can see into the past. The barely-discernible spots in Hubble images that seemed like distant stars now appear as galaxies, some spiraling, some reaching toward another source of cosmic light, some stretched by space-time itself. When we look at the universe from an infrared perspective - or compare images captured by Hubble to those from the Webb telescope - it seems, impossibly, even bigger and grander than before. These IR cameras reveal details previously hidden behind dust or gas clouds, as IR cameras have especially long wavelengths that don’t get scattered, absorbed or reflected back into the image by dust clouds. One of the Webb telescope’s unparalleled tools is its infrared (IR) cameras, which detect energy that humans can feel - but not see - as heat. Beyond that, the telescope represents the same fundamental desire that lies behind humanity's creation of robots, artificial intelligence, genetic modification and other advanced technology: the desire to understand ourselves and where we come from. The technological capabilities of the telescope will bring immeasurable knowledge and insight, especially about space exploration, potentially habitable exoplanets and mitigating climate change on Earth. Already, the telescope reveals new details about the origins of celestial bodies, galactic landscapes - and life itself. Last week, NASA released the first images from the James Webb Space Telescope, a $10 million project that launched the most powerful optical observatory ever created. (Photo by James Manning/PA Images via Getty Images) Nasa broadcasts the first images from the James Webb Space Telescope on the Piccadilly Lights screen in London.
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