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Take in this moment, remember this time right now
before you see everything.
I mean, this is going to change everything.
This is the dawn of a new era.
This is the result of a collective dream.
Today is a historic day.
Six and 1/2 months ago, a rocket launch from Earth
carrying the world's newest, most powerful deep space
telescope on a journey one million miles into the cosmos.
It's a new window into the history of our universe.
And today we're going to get a glimpse of the first light
to shine through that window.
I am thrilled and I'm relieved because when
you start something this big, there's
always a possibility it might not work.
It did work.
We are so proud.
All right.
Here we go.
OK.
So the first image is a deep field.
And it's also a deep field with a cluster.
And the important thing to realize
is that there's quite a lot of mass in the galaxy cluster.
And it acts as a magnifying source, a lens,
to stretch and distort the light and make intrinsically
faint objects brighter, so that we
can see further away galaxies.
There it is.
It's called Stephan's Quintet.
And it's wondrous.
This is a very important image and area
to study because it really shows that the type of interaction
that drives the evolution of galaxies.
So it's appropriate now that I send the broadcast
to our colleagues and friends at the Space Telescope Science
Institute in Baltimore.
That's the scientific nerve center
of the entire Webb mission.
We're sitting here outside of the Mission Operations
Center, which is the key central hub for Webb.
We are ready to see Webb's first image of a star dying,
a planetary nebula called the Southern Ring.
Wow.
NIRISS has found definitive evidence for water
in a hot gas giant exoplanet's atmosphere.
That exoplanet is called WASP-96b.
And we can see from this beautiful data
that there is water in the atmosphere.
And also there's evidence for haze and clouds,
which couldn't be seen before.
Every dot of light we see here is an individual star,
not unlike our sun.
And many of these likely also have planets.
And it just reminds me that our sun, and our planets,
and ultimately us, were formed out of the same kind of stuff
that we see here.
We humans really are connected to the universe.
We're made of the same stuff in this beautiful landscape.
And I think we should all feel extremely fortunate to be here
at this moment in time, when all of this is happening,
in the building where we control this technological marvel
from a million miles away.
The infrared photons that have been traveling
across the universe for billions of years
are captured by Webb's giant segmented mirror.
They nestled their way into some detector,
one of the amazing detectors that it has.
And then they're sent across that million mile chasm
back to us and then disseminated to the rest of the world.
This is when a new scientific journey
begins, as thousands of astronomers
throughout the world will now be able to access
the JWST data for the first time to start doing science.
Webb's first images are just the first look.
We have a fully operational telescope
that will make new discoveries.
And the science will fuel the sense of wonder and exploration
for generations to come.
In the words of the famous Carl Sagan,
somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.
I think those words are becoming reality.
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