James Webb Telescope travels back in time by watching one spot for 120 hours
The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has delivered its latest Picture of the Month and it's nothing short of breathtaking.For 120 hours, Webb's powerful eyes were fixed on the colossal galaxy cluster Abell S1063, a cosmic behemoth located 4.5 billion light-years away in the constellation Grus.This deep-field observation reveals not only the cluster's own grandeur but also a stunning array of distant, faint galaxies from the Universe's earliest epochs.advertisement
Abell S1063, previously studied by the Hubble Space Telescope's Frontier Fields program, is renowned for its immense mass and its role as a gravitational lens.
This image showcases an incredible forest of lensing arcs around Abell S1063, which reveal distorted background galaxies. (Photo: Nasa)
The cluster's gravity is so intense that it bends and magnifies the light from galaxies far behind it, creating the glowing, warped arcs seen in the new JWST image.These arcs are not just beautiful—they serve as cosmic magnifying glasses, allowing astronomers to study galaxies that would otherwise be too faint and distant to detect.Webb's Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam) took this investigation to new depths. By capturing nine separate snapshots across different near-infrared wavelengths and combining them into a single image, Webb accumulated a total of 120 hours of exposure.advertisementThis is the telescope's deepest look at a single target to date. The result is a 'forest' of lensing arcs, each one a distorted image of a galaxy from the Universe's distant past.This extraordinary image is part of the GLIMPSE observing program, which aims to probe the 'Cosmic Dawn'—the era when the first galaxies began to form, just a few million years after the Big Bang.The gravitational lensing effect of Abell S1063, combined with Webb's unmatched sensitivity, has enabled scientists to spot previously unseen features and a multitude of faint galaxies.The new deep-field view not only showcases the power of the JWST but also brings humanity closer to understanding the origins of the cosmos, offering a glimpse of the very first galaxies that lit up the Universe.Must Watch
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