POT‘s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has captured never-before-seen galaxies that look like dazzling diamonds in the blackness of space.
The image transports viewers 13.5 billion years ago to an early universe with faint, distant lights emanating from newly formed galaxies in an area known as the North Ecliptic Pole.
The swath of sky captured in the photograph is only two percent covered by Earth’s full moon, but JWST can look deep into this region and observe thousands of bright galaxies stretching to the farthest corners of the universe.
The cosmic objects seen in the image are billions of times fainter than can be seen with the naked eye, but the telescope’s Near Infrared Camera (NIRCam) captured the spectra of light coming from the objects in the image.
A new image from the NASA telescope captures thousands of never-before-seen galaxies that formed 13.5 billion years ago, 200 million years after the Big Bang.
The image is one of the first mid-depth wide-field images of the cosmos and is from the GTO Prime Extragalactic Areas for Reionization and Lensing Science (PEARLS) program.
The researchers involved in this work explain that ‘medium depth’ refers to the faintest objects that can be seen in this image, which are about magnitude 29 (a billion times fainter than what can be seen with the naked eye). ).
And ‘wide field’ refers to the total area the program will cover, about one twelfth the area of a full moon.
Rogier Windhorst, Regents Professor at Arizona State University (ASU) and Principal Investigator for PEARLS, said in a statement: “For more than two decades, I have worked with a large international team of scientists to prepare our Webb Science Program.”
Webb’s images are truly phenomenal, truly beyond my wildest dreams. They allow me to measure the number density of galaxies that shine down to the very faint infrared limits and the total amount of light they produce.
The image includes eight different colors from NIRCam and three colors from ultraviolet and visible light from the Hubble Space Telescope.
Jake Summers, a research assistant at ASU, said, “Webb’s images far exceeded what we expected from my simulations in the months before the first scientific observations.”
‘Looking at them, I was very surprised by the exquisite resolution.
“There are many objects I never thought we could actually see, including individual globular clusters around distant elliptical galaxies, star-forming knots within spiral galaxies, and thousands of faint galaxies in the background.”
The NIRCam observations will be combined with spectra obtained with the Webb Near-Infrared Imaging and Slitless Spectrograph (NIRISS), allowing the team to search for faint objects with spectral emission lines, which can be used to estimate their distances with Greater precision.
Rosalia O’Brien, a graduate research assistant at ASU, said: “The diffuse light that I measured in front of and behind stars and galaxies has cosmological significance, encoding the history of the universe.”
‘I feel very lucky to start my career right now. Webb’s data is unlike anything we’ve seen before, and I’m very excited about the opportunities and challenges he offers.”
Anton Koekemoer, a research astronomer at STScI, who assembled the PEARLS images into very large mosaics, said the image quality is “truly out of this world.”
“To glimpse very rare galaxies at the dawn of cosmic time, we need deep images over a large area, which this PEARLS field provides,” he continued.
The north pole of the ecliptic is located in the constellation Draco, one of the largest in the sky, which is 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 2nd century.
JWST has taken other images of spiral galaxies, with one revealing the chaos of the Cartwheel Galaxy lying 489.2 million light-years from Earth.
The image also shows individual globular clusters around distant elliptical galaxies and knots of star formation within spiral galaxies (pictured).
JWST has taken other images of spiral galaxies, with one revealing the chaos of the Cartwheel Galaxy lying 489.2 million light-years from Earth.
Like a cartwheel, its appearance is the result of an extreme event: a high-speed collision between a large spiral galaxy and a smaller galaxy not seen in this image.
Other telescopes, including the Hubble Space Telescope, have previously examined the Cartwheel.
But the dramatic galaxy has long been shrouded in mystery, perhaps literally, given how much dust obscures the view.
JWST’s infrared capabilities mean it can “look back in time” to within just 100 to 200 million years of the Big Bang, allowing it to take pictures of the first stars to shine in the universe more than 13.5 billion years ago. .
His first images of nebulae, an exoplanet and galaxy clusters sparked huge celebrations in the scientific world on what was hailed as a “great day for humanity.”
Researchers will soon begin to learn more about the masses, ages, histories, and compositions of galaxies as the telescope seeks to explore the earliest galaxies in the universe.
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The James Webb Telescope: NASA’s $10 billion telescope is designed to detect light from the first stars and galaxies.
The James Webb Telescope has been described as a ‘time machine’ that could help unlock the secrets of our universe.
The telescope will be used to observe the first galaxies born in the early universe more than 13.5 billion years ago and to observe the sources of stars, exoplanets and even the moons and planets of our solar system.
The big telescope, which has already cost more than $7bn (£5bn), is seen as a successor to the orbiting Hubble Space Telescope.
The James Webb Telescope and most of its instruments have an operating temperature of about 40 Kelvin, about minus 387 Fahrenheit (minus 233 Celsius).
It is the largest and most powerful orbiting space telescope in the world, capable of looking back 100-200 million years after the Big Bang.
The orbiting infrared observatory is designed to be about 100 times more powerful than its predecessor, the Hubble Space Telescope.
NASA likes to think of James Webb as a successor to Hubble rather than a replacement, since the two will be working in tandem for a while.
The Hubble Telescope was launched on April 24, 1990 via the Space Shuttle Discovery from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
It circles the Earth at a speed of approximately 17,000 mph (27,300 kph) in a low Earth orbit at approximately 340 mile altitude.
