James Webb updates: NASA reveals 5 stunning, new images from telescope

NASA scientists said the images and data that will be collected from the James Webb Space Telescope will be groundbreaking in our understanding of the universe.

"This going to be revolutionary," said Jane Rigby, the operations project scientist for the telescope, during a press conference Tuesday. "These are previous capabilities we’ve never had before."

Her comments come after NASA released five new images with never-before-seen detail of exoplanets, stars, nebulae and galaxies in the universe.

Rigby said she cried from happiness after seeing the first images that Webb captured.

"It was a combination of giddy like, 'Oh my gosh, this is great,' and having a sob like, 'Oh my God, this works,'" she said.

NASA revealed the difference in images taken by the James Webb Space Telescope, the first of which were revealed Tuesday, and its predecessor, the Hubble Space Telescope.

In a tweet, the space agency posted images of Stephan’s Quintet, a cluster of five galaxies -- four of which interact.

The 2009 image taken by Hubble was captured over the span of several weeks and show the galaxies surrounded by several stars.

Meanwhile, the 2022 image taken by Webb was captured in less than one week and reveals hundreds of star formations never seen before because the telescope uses infrared technology, which reveals objects invisible to the human eye due to being surrounded by clouds, gas and dust.

The final image revealed Tuesday from the James Webb Space Telescope has revealed new details about the Carina Nebula, located in the Milky Way Galaxy.

The image, which is actually just the edge of the nebula, shows hundreds of stars never seen before within the cloud.

Because of the massive amounts of dust and gas that exist within the nebula, the stars were not visible to the human eye.

The area, referred to as the Cosmic Cliffs, shows a "giant, gaseous cavity" as young stars that were recently born push down ultraviolet radiation and create the jagged-looking edge.

NASA's newest image from the Webb telescope shows Stephan's Quintet, a group of five galaxies located 290 million light-years away.

According to the space agency, the image "contains over 150 million pixels and is constructed from almost 1,000 separate image files."

The image provides new information about the cluster, including the birth of millions of stars -- as they happened millions of years ago -- and tails of gas and dust that are being pulled in different directions as the galaxies engage in a "cosmic dance."

The "most surprising" image, NASA said, is one of the galaxies, NGC 7318B, crashing through the middle of the cluster.