NASA has released the clearest infrared image of the universe ever taken by the James Webb Space Telescope. It shows the galaxy cluster SMACS 0723 as it appeared 4.6 billion years ago.

The image was taken with a near-infrared camera (NIRCam). It took 12.5 hours to create it. If another telescope, such as Hubble, made it, it would take weeks.

The combined mass of this galaxy cluster acts like a gravitational lens, magnifying the much more distant galaxies behind it. Thanks to NIRCam, these galaxies were able to be focused. They turned out to have tiny, faint structures that had never been seen before. Among them are star clusters and diffuse details.

The James Webb telescope was launched into space from the Kourou launch site in French Guiana on an Ariane-5 rocket late last year. It is supposed to replace the Hubble, which has been operating in orbit for 31 years and is increasingly failing. In the next decade, Webb will be the main engine for the development of world astronomy and astrophysics. It targets regions 13.6 billion light-years from Earth.