The National Aeronautics and Space Administration on Tuesday released a new batch of photos of the cosmos taken by the James Webb Space Telescope.

Launched on December 25, the $10 billion James Webb Space Telescope is the world’s largest and most powerful space science telescope. It is equipped with a powerful array of detectors and is about 100 times more sensitive in comparison to its 30-year-old predecessor, the Hubble Space Telescope.

The unveiling of the series began at the White House on Monday with a picture of a 4.6 billion-year-old galaxy cluster called SMACS 0723. NASA said this was the deepest and sharpest infrared image of the distant universe ever taken.

In this handout photo from NASA obtained on July 11, the first infrared image from the James Webb Space Telescope is seen. Credit: NASA/AFP

Photos released on Tuesday morning showed images from the Carina Nebula, one of the bright stellar nurseries in the sky, and offered a glimpse of a cluster of galaxies much farther away.

NASA said the first full-color and high-resolution pictures from the James Webb Space Telescope have ushered in “the dawn of a new era in astronomy”.

This image from the James Webb Space Telescope shows a landscape of “mountains” and “valleys” speckled with glittering stars which is actually the edge of a nearby, young, star-forming region called NGC 3324 in the Carina Nebula. Captured in infrared light by the JWST, this image reveals for the first time previously invisible areas of star birth. Credit: NASA/AFP
This image shows the dimmer star at the center of this scene has been sending out rings of gas and dust for thousands of years in all directions, and the James Webb Space Telescope has revealed for the first time that this star is cloaked in dust. Two cameras aboard Webb captured the latest image of this planetary nebula, cataloged as NGC 3132, and known informally as the Southern Ring Nebula, which is approximately 2,500 light-years away. Credit: NASA/AFP
This image captured by the James Webb Space Telescope shows Stephan’s Quintet, a visual grouping of five galaxies, in a new light. This enormous mosaic is JWST’s largest image to date, covering about one-fifth of the Moon’s diameter. It contains over 150 million pixels and is constructed from almost 1,000 separate image files. Credit: NASA/AFP