NASA and President Joe Biden have unveiled the first full-color image from the James Webb Space Telescope, which is the most detailed image of the universe ever taken.

The spectacular and mind-bending photo, titled 'Webb's First Deep Field,' provides a glimpse into our universe just hundreds million years after the Big Bang, as the first galaxies begin to form and light starts to flicker.

It took roughly 13.5 billion years for this starlight to reach the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) after gravity warping from the galaxy cluster SMACS 0723 pulled even the faintest and most distant of light into focus.

As NASA administrator Bill Nelson explained at the press conference, 'We're going back 13.5 billion years.'

Nelson added that the telescope 'will be so precise we'll be able to see if planets are habitable,' and its unprecedented views of the universe would allow scientists to answer questions they haven't even considered. 

Nelson explained that, despite the overwhelming density and rapidly exponential number of stars, galaxies, and planets within the image, it was just a tiny slice of the night sky.

Nelson said, 'If you held a grain of sand at arm's length, that would be what you're seeing from the tip of your finger, a minute speck in the vast scheme of things.' There are now billions of galaxies with billions of stars. A century ago, we thought there was only one galaxy. Now there are billions.'

Hubble Space Telescope previously held the record for capturing the deepest and oldest glimpse into space. Several hundred million years after the Big Bang, our young universe already had galaxies of glistening stars coalescing.

As the expansion of the universe shifted light farther and further away, scientists needed to build telescopes that were large enough to detect the most distant light as well as ones capable of detecting the mid-infrared frequencies.

JWST has collected the first image of many to come. NASA will release four further featuring images of a stellar nursery, an atmosphere of a distant exoplanet, a figure-eight-shaped gas explosion from a dying star, and a 'quintet of galaxies locked in a cosmic dance of endless near-collisions,' according to NASA.