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 transports viewers back 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 photo is only two percent covered by Earth’s full moon, but JWST can peer deep into this region and observe thousands of brilliant galaxies stretching to the far reaches of the universe.
The cosmic objects seen in the image are a billion times fainter than what 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.
New NASA telescope image 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 wide-field intermediate-depth images of the cosmos and is from the Primary Extragalactic Regions of Reionization and Lensing Science (PEARLS) GTO program.
The researchers involved in this work explain that “intermediately deep” refers to the faintest objects that can be seen in this image, which are about 29th magnitude (one billion times fainter than what can to be seen with the naked eye).
And “wide field” refers to the total area that will be covered by the program, about one-twelfth the area of the full moon.
Rogier Windhorst, Regents Professor at Arizona State University (ASU) and principal investigator of 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 density of galaxies shining down to very faint infrared limits and the total amount of light they produce.
The image includes eight different colors of NIRCam and three colors of ultraviolet and visible light from the Hubble Space Telescope.
Jake Summers, an associate research scientist at ASU, said: “The Webb images far exceed what we expected from my simulations in the months before the first scientific observations.
“Looking at them, I was most surprised by the exquisite resolution.
“There are many objects that I never thought we would actually be able to see, including individual globular clusters around distant elliptical galaxies, star-forming nodes in spiral galaxies, and thousands of faint background galaxies.”
The NIRCam observations will be combined with spectra obtained with Webb’s Near-Infrared Imager and Slitless Spectrograph (NIRISS), allowing the team to search for faint objects with spectral emission lines that can be used to more accurately estimate their distances.
Rosalia O’Brien, a graduate scientist at ASU, said, “The diffuse light 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 ever seen, and I’m really excited about the opportunities and challenges it presents.
Anton Koekemoer, a research astronomer at STScI who assembled the PEARLS images into very large mosaics, said the image quality was “truly out of this world”.
“To catch a glimpse of very rare galaxies at the dawn of spacetime, we need the deep, large-area images that this PEARLS field provides,” he continued.
The north ecliptic pole 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, one of which reveals the chaos of the Cartwheel Galaxy, which is 489.2 million light-years from Earth.
The image also shows individual globular clusters around distant elliptical galaxies and knots of star formation in spiral galaxies (pictured)
JWST took other images of spiral galaxies, with one revealing the chaos of the Cartwheel Galaxy, which is 489.2 million light-years from Earth
Like a wagon wheel, its appearance is the result of an extreme event – a high-speed collision between a large spiral galaxy and a smaller galaxy not visible in this image.
Other telescopes, including the Hubble Space Telescope, have already studied the Wheel.
But the dramatic galaxy is shrouded in mystery—perhaps literally, given the amount of dust that obscures the view.
JWST’s infrared capabilities mean it can “see back in time” to within just 100 to 200 million years of the Big Bang, allowing it to take pictures of the first stars that shone 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 for what was hailed as a “great day for mankind”.
Researchers will soon begin to learn more about the masses, ages, histories and compositions of galaxies as the telescope seeks to probe the earliest galaxies in the universe.
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James Webb Telescope: NASA’s $10 billion telescope designed to detect light from the earliest 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 look back to the first galaxies born in the early universe more than 13.5 billion years ago and observe the sources of stars, exoplanets and even the moons and planets of our solar system.
The huge telescope, already worth more than $7 billion (£5 billion), is seen as the successor to the orbiting Hubble Space Telescope
The James Webb Telescope and most of its instruments have an operating temperature of approximately 40 Kelvin—about minus 387 Fahrenheit (minus 233 Celsius).
It is the largest and most powerful orbiting space telescope in the world, capable of peering 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 Hubble’s successor rather than a replacement, as the two will work in tandem for some time.
The Hubble Space Telescope was launched on April 24, 1990, by the Space Shuttle Discovery from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
It orbits the Earth at about 17,000 miles per hour (27,300 kilometers per hour) in a low-Earth orbit about 340 miles above sea level.
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