It was the most anticipated image by the scientific community, anxious to see the first photos captured by the most powerful space telescope built on Tuesday, but the US president has gone ahead.
Joe Biden showed this Monday during an event held at the White House the first snapshot of deep space taken by James Webb.
This Tuesday, NASA and ESA, which jointly operate the most powerful space telescope, will publish the first set of images taken by the observatory, as announced.
This first observation is an image taken with a very long exposure time to detect the faintest objects in the distance.
Webb achieved this shot by pointing his main imager at SMACS 0723, a conglomeration of massive foreground galaxy clusters that magnify and distort light from objects behind them, allowing deep-field views of both populations of extremely distant galaxies as well as intrinsically faint ones.
NASA Administrator Bill Nelson last month dubbed Webb's now-released observation the "deepest image of our Universe ever taken" in the infrared.
It reaches 13,000 million light years away, according to him he commented in the presentation before Biden.
NASA will release the rest of the first wave of images from the Webb telescope on Tuesday.
They correspond to the Carina Nebula, the spectrum of the planet WASP-96b, the South Ring Nebula, and the compact group of galaxies called Stephan's Quintet.
The Webb Space Telescope is an international mission led by NASA, ESA and the Canadian Space Agency.
Launched on Christmas Day 2021 and finally placed 1.5 million kilometers from Earth, its 6.5-meter diameter main mirror promises much more precise observations than those of its predecessor, the Hubble telescope.
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Astronomy