NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has captured never-before-seen galaxies that look like dazzling diamonds in the blackness of space.
The image takes viewers back 13.5 billion years to the early universe, with faint, distant lights emanating from newly formed galaxies known as the sun’s north pole.
Only 2% of the imaged sky is covered by Earth’s full moon, but JWST can delve into this region and observe thousands of twinkling galaxies stretching out to the far corners of the universe.
Cosmic objects in the image are billions of times brighter than visible to the naked eye, but the telescope’s Near Infrared Camera (NIRCam) has recorded the spectrum of light coming from the objects in the image.
New image from NASA telescope captures thousands of unprecedented galaxies that formed 13.5 billion years ago – 200 million years after the Big Bang
The image is one of the first wide-field, medium-depth images of the universe and is from the GTO Prime Extragalactic Reionization and Lensing Sciences (PEARLS) program.
The researchers involved in the work explain that the term “average depth” refers to the faintest object in the image, which has a magnitude of about 29 (a billion times brighter than visible to the naked eye).
The term “wide field” refers to the area covered entirely by the program, about one-twelfth the area of the full moon.
“For more than two decades, I’ve worked with a large international team of scientists to create our web science program,” said Roger Windhorst, Regent Professor at Arizona State University (ASU) and principal investigator for PEARLS.
Webb’s photos are truly exceptional, truly beyond my wildest dreams. It allows me to measure the intensity of the number of bright galaxies at the very faint infrared limit and the total amount of light they produce.
The image features eight different colors from NIRCam and three colors from ultraviolet and visible light from the Hubble Space Telescope.
“Web images far exceed what we expected from simulations conducted in the months leading up to the first scientific observations,” said Jake Summers, a research assistant at Arizona State University.
Looking at them, I was surprised at the impressive accuracy.
There are many things I didn’t think we could actually see, including unique globular clusters around distant elliptical galaxies, star-forming nodes within spiral galaxies, and thousands of faint background galaxies.
The NIRCam observations are combined with spectra obtained with the Webb Near Infrared Imager and Slit-Free Spectrometer (NIRISS), allowing the team to search for fainter objects with spectral emission lines that can be used to estimate the distance between them more accurately.
“The scattered light that I’ve measured in front of and behind stars and galaxies has cosmological significance and symbolizes the history of the universe,” said Rosalia O’Brien, a graduate research assistant at Arizona State University.
I feel very fortunate to be starting my career now. Webb’s data is unlike anything we’ve seen before, and I’m very excited about the opportunities and challenges it poses.
STScI astronomer Anton Kwikimore, who has combined the PEARLS images into a very large mosaic, said the image quality is “really out of this world”.
He continued: “To look at very rare galaxies at the dawn of cosmic time, we need deep imaging over the large area provided by the PEARLS field.
The north pole of the ecliptic is in the constellation Draco, one of the largest constellations in the sky, located in the northern celestial hemisphere.
It is one of the ancient Greek constellations, and was first cataloged by the Greek astronomer Ptolemy in the second century.
JWST has also captured other images of spiral galaxies, one of which shows the chaotic Cartwheel galaxy 489.2 million light-years from Earth.
The image also shows distinct globular clusters around distant elliptical galaxies and star-forming nodes within spiral galaxies (pictured).
JWST has also captured other images of spiral galaxies, one of which shows the chaotic Cartwheel galaxy 489.2 million light-years from Earth.
Like a wagon wheel, its appearance is caused by an extreme event — a high-speed collision between a large spiral galaxy and a smaller one, not visible in this image.
Other telescopes, including the Hubble Space Telescope, have examined the cartwheel previously.
But the dramatic galaxy was shrouded in mystery — perhaps quite literally, given the amount of dust obscuring the view.
JWST’s infrared capabilities mean it can “see past” only 100 to 200 million years after the Big Bang, allowing it to take pictures of the first stars in the universe over 13.5 billion years ago.
His first images of nebulae, exoplanets and galaxy clusters caused huge celebrations in the scientific world in an event known as “The Great Day of Humanity”.
Researchers will soon begin to learn more about the masses, ages, histories and compositions of galaxies as the telescope strives to uncover the oldest galaxies in the universe.
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