Astronomers will have their way.
Scientists used the powerful $10 billion James Webb Space Telescope to peer into the deepest universe, capturing the first glimpses of star clusters inside an extremely old galaxy. In the images below, you are viewing these star clusters, which are gravitationally bound groupings of stars as they existed only 460 million years after the creation of the universe. That’s a view over 97 percent of cosmic time.
This deeply deep cosmic view was made possible by the double whammy of the Webb Telescope’s unprecedented sensitivity — its 21-foot-wide gold-plated mirrors detect extremely faint light sources — and a natural phenomenon called “gravitational lensing.” In the foreground sits a massive cluster of galaxies, each containing hundreds of billions of stars, millions of black holes and possibly trillions of planets. The combined mass of these galaxies warps space like a bowling ball sitting on a mattress. Creates a giant magnifying lens.
“Webb’s incredible sensitivity and angular resolution at near-infrared wavelengths, combined with the gravitational lensing provided by the massive foreground galaxy cluster, made this discovery possible,” said Larry Bradley, an astrophysicist at the Space Telescope Science Institute, which manages the Webb telescope. declaration.
“No other telescope could have made this discovery,” Bradley, who led the new research published in the journal Science Naturehe added.
A NASA scientist viewed the first images from Voyager. What he saw sent chills down his spine.
The image below shows this unprecedented cosmic view.
– Right: Almost every object in this image is the entire galaxy (except for the six-pointed stars in the foreground). The white galaxies in the center form the massive galaxy cluster SPT-CL J0615−5746, which forms a gravitational lens.
– Left: Two lenticular or magnified galaxies. The galaxy at the bottom, called the “Cosmic Gem Arc”, is shown with a number of separate star clusters. There are actually five, but gravitational lensing can sometimes create mirror images of objects when properly observed from our position in space.
The image on the left shows Webb’s zoomed-in view of two gravitationally lensed galaxies, with the Cosmic Gems arc visible below.
Acknowledgments: ESA Webb / NASA / CSA / L. Bradley (STScI) / A. Adamo (Stockholm University) / Cosmic Spring collaboration
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Astronomers are using Webb to learn about the creation of the oldest stars and galaxies — ultimately revealing more about our cosmic history in the Milky Way galaxy. In addition, astronomers suspect that these first galaxies – and the massive star clusters within, which may eventually form even larger “globular clusters” – emitted intense radiation into the early universe, eventually breaking up dense clouds of gas that had saturated space, making it largely opaque. Ultimately, this ended the cosmic “dark age”. The brilliant starlight was no longer hidden; light was finally released, about 1 billion years after the universe began.
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“No other telescope could have made this discovery.”
Today, with the help of Webb, we can see these significant objects from outer space.
“The surprise and awe was incredible when we first opened the Webb images,” Angela Adamo, an astronomer at Stockholm University who is also an author of the research, marveled in a statement. “We saw a small chain of bright points, mirrored from one side to the other – these cosmic gems are star clusters! Without Webb, we wouldn’t know we were looking at star clusters in such a young galaxy!”
The powerful capabilities of the Webb Telescope
The Webb Telescope – a science collaboration between NASA, ESA and the Canadian Space Agency – is designed to peer into the deepest space and reveal new insights into the early universe. But it also looks at interesting planets in our galaxy, along with planets and moons in our solar system.
Here’s how Webb is achieving unmatched performance and likely will be for decades:
– giant mirror: Webb’s light-catching mirror is over 21 feet in diameter. That’s more than two and a half times the size of the Hubble Space Telescope’s mirror. Capturing more light allows Webb to see more distant, ancient objects. As described above, the telescope looks at stars and galaxies that formed more than 13 billion years ago, just a few hundred million years after the Big Bang.
“We’re going to see the very first stars and galaxies that ever formed,” Jean Creighton, astronomer and director of the Manfred Olson Planetarium at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, told Mashable in 2021.
– Infrared view: Unlike Hubble, which largely observes light visible to us, Webb is primarily an infrared telescope, meaning it observes light in the infrared spectrum. This allows us to see far more from space. Infrared radiation has longer wavelengths than visible light, so light waves pass through space clouds more efficiently; light is not so often collimated and scattered by these densely packed particles. Webb’s infrared vision may eventually penetrate places that HST cannot.
“It lifts the veil,” Creighton said.
– View of distant exoplanets: Webb telescope it carries specialized equipment called spectrographs this will change our understanding of these distant worlds. The instruments can decipher what molecules (such as water, carbon dioxide and methane) exist in the atmospheres of distant exoplanets – whether they are gas giants or smaller rocky worlds. Webb will look at exoplanets in the Milky Way galaxy. Who knows what we’ll find?
“We could learn things we never thought about,” Mercedes López-Morales, an exoplanet researcher and astrophysicist at the Center for Astrophysics-Harvard & Smithsonian, told Mashable in 2021.
Astronomers have already successfully found interesting chemical reactions on a planet 700 light-years away, and as described above, the observatory began looking at one of the most anticipated places in the universe: the rocky Earth-sized planet of the solar TRAPPIST. System.