The James Webb Space Telescope is observing the faint “Pearl” galaxy in a stunning new view
NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope continues to dazzle, this time with a fascinating image that reveals never-before-seen galaxies in a region known as the sun’s north pole.
The image is one of the few wide-field and medium-depth images of our universe and shows thousands of images galaxies Across a bewildering range of distances, it stretches out into the farthest reaches of the universe, while also being star-studded by our own stars Milky Way. the new James Webb Space Telescope The image (Webb or JWST), which comes from the Prime Extragalactic Areas for Reionization and Lensing Science (PEARLS) program, also highlights a number of interacting galaxies.
“I was blown away by the first PEARLS images,” said Rolf Jansen, an ASU astronomer and PEARLS co-investigator. statement.
“Little did I know, when I picked this field near the North Pole, that it would yield a treasure trove of distant galaxies, and that we would get direct evidence about the processes by which galaxies gather and grow,” he said. “I can see streams and tails and shells and halos of stars on its outskirts, the remnants of its building blocks.”
Gallery: First images from the James Webb Space Telescope
The near infrared webcam (NIRCam) captured the twinkling scene, which covers a patch of sky about 2% of the area covered by the full moon. The image was created using eight different colors of near-infrared light collected by NIRCam, enhanced with three colors of ultraviolet and visible light from Hubble Space Telescope.
The word “mean depth” refers to the faintest objects visible in this image, which are a billion times weaker than what can be seen with the naked eye, according to NASA. statement. The PEARLS program focuses on gravitational lens objects in the background of galaxy clusters; These clusters are so massive that they warp space-time, amplifying the light from objects behind them.
The location of this particular area of the sky, at the ecliptic’s north pole, means that it can also be observed at any time of the year and is not obscured by the sun during JWST’s rotation. Regular sightings mean that JWST can see what’s emerging in this field, promising opportunities for time-scale astronomy, which focuses on how astronomical objects change over time.
“Such observations will enable the detection of time-varying objects such as distant, explosive supernovae and bright accretion gas around black holes in active galaxies, which should be detectable at greater distances than ever before,” Anton Cockeymore, an astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute (STI) STScI) in Maryland, which operates JWST, and is a member of the PEARLS team, said in the statement.
The research is described in a paper Published Wednesday (December 14) in the Astronomical Journal.
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