NASA Telescope Captures Smog From More 12 Billion Years In The Past

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Researchers at Texas A&M University have used the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's (NASA)n James Webb telescope to discover smoke and smog particles in a galaxy that is a whopping 12 billion light years away from Earth. Officially described as 'organic particles', the discovery allows astronomers to take a peek at a time when the universe was in its earliest stages of formation. It was published in Nature Journal earlier this month and is one of the first of its kind of discovery made by the Webb telescope that has awed both astronomers and the general public with its crisp images of galaxies.

The James Webb telescope was launched in December 2021 and started operating roughly six months later, in June 2022. Its first set of images came a month later as part of a test of the telescope's four primary scientific instruments. These instruments are a near-infrared camera, a near-infrared spectrograph, a mid-infrared instrument and a group of sensors and spectrographs.

At the same time, not only can the telescope capture crisper images, but it can also compute them much faster than its predecessors - a crucial feature for a tool designed to capture hundreds of gigabytes of imaging data.

Now, it has enabled astronomers at Texas A&M University to see the early stages of the universe's formation. The universe is roughly 13.7 billion years old and the images capture smoke and smog from a stunning 12 billion light years away from Earth. For lack of better wording, this is nothing short of a look at the past since the galaxies visible in the image will be in a different form today