NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has captured never-before-seen galaxies that look like dazzling diamonds in the darkness of space.
The image takes viewers back 13.5 billion years to the early universe with faint, distant lights emanating from newly forming galaxies known as the North Pole of the Sun.
Only 2% of the imaged sky is covered by Earth’s full moon, but JWST can peer deeper into this region and observe thousands of glittering galaxies that stretch to the farthest corners of the universe.
The cosmic objects in the image are billions of times brighter than those visible to the naked eye, but the telescope’s near-infrared camera (NIRCam) recorded the spectrum of light from the objects in the image.
New image from NASA telescope captures unprecedented thousands of galaxies that formed 13.5 billion years ago – 200 million years after the Big Bang
The image is one of the first wide-field, intermediate-depth images of the universe and comes 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 entire area covered by the program, approximately one-twelfth the area of the full moon.
“For more than two decades, I have worked with a large international team of scientists to build our Web Science program,” said Roger Windhorst, Arizona State University (ASU) regent professor and PEARLS principal investigator.
Webb’s photos are truly exceptional, truly beyond my wildest dreams. He allows me to measure the intensity of the number of galaxies that shine in the very faint infrared and the total amount of light they produce.
The image contains eight different colors from NIRCam and three colors from ultraviolet and visible light from the Hubble Space Telescope.
“The web images far exceed what we expected from simulations performed 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 by the impressive accuracy.
There are many things I never thought 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 using the Webb Near Infrared Imager and Slit-Free Spectrometer (NIRISS), allowing the team to look for faint objects with spectral emission lines that can be used to more accurately estimate their distance.
“The scattered light that I 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 lucky to have started my career now. Webb’s data is unlike anything we’ve seen before, and I’m very excited about the opportunities and challenges he presents.
The image quality is “really out of this world,” said STScI astronomer Anton Koekemoer, who combined the PEARLS images into one very large mosaic.
He continued: “To observe very rare galaxies at the dawn of cosmic time, we need deep imaging over a large area, which the PEARLS field provides.
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 2nd century.
JWST also took 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 also took other images of spiral galaxies, one of which shows the chaotic Cartwheel galaxy 489.2 million light-years from Earth.
Like a cartwheel, 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 already examined the chariot wheel.
But the dramatic galaxy was shrouded in mystery, perhaps literally, given the amount of dust that obscured the view.
JWST’s infrared capabilities mean it can “see past time” within just 100 to 200 million years after the Big Bang, allowing it to take pictures of the first stars in the universe more than 13.5 billion years ago.
His first images of nebulae, exoplanets and galaxy clusters caused great celebrations in the scientific world in an event known as the “Great Day of Mankind”.
Researchers will soon begin to learn more about the masses, ages, histories and compositions of galaxies as the telescope seeks to discover the oldest galaxies in the universe.
If you liked this article...
NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope captures stunning images of thousands of never-before-seen young stars in the Tarantula Nebula.
Also, NASA’s James Webb Telescope reveals a stunning new image of the Pillars of Creation, which looks like a ghostly hand reaching out into space.
