NASA’s Webb Space Telescope Reveals the Shining Universe in Its Largest View Ever

Milestones for the James Webb Space Telescope came one after another. A little over a month after the first intergalactic images, nebula portraits, and stellar artifacts were released, this groundbreaking instrument has given us its biggest view yet, a little over a month after it astonished humanity.

Last week, international scientists, Cosmic Evolution Early Broadcast Science The survey, or CEERS, presented an enormous, full-color mosaic that emerged from data collected by JWST. A record-breaking mural known as Epoch 1 covers a small patch of sky near the stem of the Ursa Major constellation.

already CEERS collaboration you have been Descriptive glances at the 1st EpochMany astronomers have sent the JWST discovery down the rabbit hole and publishing articles about the galactic beauty within. For example, Steven Finkelstein, project head of CEERS announced last month that an article will be submitted “very convincing” galaxy candidate It could have existed only 290 million years after the Big Bang. It’s called Maisie’s galaxy, because it was discovered on her daughter’s birthday.

But now, CEERS says Epoch 1 is officially complete.

How completely for context large In this final image, the team explains, JWST covers an area roughly eight times larger than the already unimaginably large First Deep Field, released on July 11. The culminating mosaic consists of 690 individual frames captured with JWST’s Near Infrared Camera and will build on observations scheduled for December.

“Age 1 covers less than half of our total research area in the sky, and the images have already led to new discoveries and an unexpected, but undesirable, never-before-seen abundance of galaxies,” the CEERS team said in a press release. .

You can download a medium or high resolution version your picture here — but if you’re shooting for the latter, as I certainly do, CEERS recommends using a computer or laptop. Due to the size of this file, your mobile phone may start working.

Ok, now that you have successfully accessed the image, let’s discuss some key points. There are six main points of interest, according to the CEERS team. Here is a diagram.

First, there is the upper-left spiral galaxy in (1), which emits a redshift of z = 0.16.

Redshift is essentially astronomers’ way of measuring how far an object is, and therefore traveling back in time. As a luminous object moves away from our point of view, it gets its name because the light it emits becomes more and more red. It falls into the infrared region of the electromagnetic spectrum, making it invisible to the human eye.. Fear not, though, because JWST can also collect this “invisible” light, so it promises to reveal an “unfiltered universe,” a phrase you may have seen floating around the internet.

In short, a larger redshift means something is further away from Earth.

Then there is a bright galaxy in (2) with a redshift z = 1.05 towards the center of the image. This spot also contains several small galaxies that appear in an arc-like format when viewed with JWST. On August 15, Rebecca Larson, a PhD student in astronomy at the University of Texas at Austin and member of the CEERS collaboration, tweeted her cute name for this scene.

“TBT until late one night when I decided on this galaxy… larson wrote.

To the right of this gaggle (3) shows an interacting system of galaxies at z = 1.4. Finkelstein nicknamed it the “Space Kraken,” tweeted Larson. It strangely resembles the scary ancient sea monster.

Go over one, to (4), and you’ll notice a double spiral galaxy — in the magnified version at the bottom of the diagram, a white arrow indicates a supernova that was also discovered by astronomers in this part of the sky. JWST. Here the redshift is z = 0.7. CEERS published an article last month especially about these phenomena, because comparing the JWST version of the duo with that of the Hubble Space Telescope could offer a lot of new information.

Below that (5) shows another special spiral galaxy at z = 0.7 and finally (6) is az = 0.63 galaxy with a tidal tail and a background grouping of red galaxies falling to z = 1.85. Larson tweeted about this chaotic landscape, “I tried to call this feature a ‘hot space mess’ but the press staff said ‘no’.

And of course CEERS also highlights Maisie’s galaxy in the close-up diagram below. It has an astonishing redshift of z = 14 if Finkelstein and colleagues are correct about it, existing 290 million light-years after the Big Bang. Basically, prove that galaxies once began forming in the universe much earlier than astronomers thought..

However, due to the abundance of very distant galaxy candidates detected since the JWST opened, many scientists guard against the possibility of false hope. For example, a paper published earlier this month in The Astrophysical Journal by CEERS collaborators highlights the possibility of error in the following situations, for example. controlling these high redshift realms. Unrelated cosmic phenomena may basically be bombarding data by photographing and therefore contaminating the results.

However, the new era of astronomy we find ourselves in is aggressively exciting.

“I hope you are as excited and excited about this telescope and its data as I am. I am so lucky to share these with you and I hope you find your new favorite galaxies in them!” Larson tweeted a great thread on the CEERS map as a result.