Latest news with #COSMOS-Web
Yahoo
a day ago
- Science
- Yahoo
James Webb Space Telescope reveals largest-ever panorama of the early universe
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. Astronomers using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) have unveiled the largest map of the early universe to date, a sweeping cosmic panorama that offers seasoned scientists and curious stargazers alike a front-row seat to the ancient cosmos. The images come from COSMOS-Web, the largest observing program the James Webb Space Telescope undertook in its first year. It surveyed a patch of sky equivalent to the width of three full moons placed side-by-side, the telescope's widest observation area to date. The survey stitched together more than 10,000 exposures, revealing nearly 800,000 galaxies, many of which shine from the universe's earliest eras. Harnessing the abundance of data that came from this effort, on Thursday (June 5), the team released the largest contiguous image ever captured by the JWST, along with a free, interactive catalog detailing the properties of each galaxy — a cosmic record that's as vast as it is richly detailed. "I don't know if the James Webb Space Telescope will ever cover an area of this size again, and so I think it'll be a good reference and a good data set that people will use for many years," Jeyhan Kartaltepe, an astrophysicist at the Rochester Institute of Technology in New York and the lead researcher of COSMOS-Web, told "The hope is that, now, anybody at any institution can make use of this data for their own science." When the JWST launched in 2021, the global COSMOS-Web team comprising nearly 50 researchers from institutions around the world was awarded over 200 hours of observation time, the most allocated to any project in the telescope's inaugural year. While many JWST studies zoom in on small, deep slices of sky, COSMOS-Web prioritized breadth, capturing a wider cosmic canvas that brought to light 10 times more galaxies than astronomers anticipated from these early epochs. "It was incredible to reveal galaxies that were previously invisible at other wavelengths, and very gratifying to finally see them appear on our computers," Maximilien Franco, postdoctoral researcher of astrophysics at the University of Hertfordshire in the U.K., said in a statement. The JWST's expansive view allows astronomers not only to catalog distant galaxies, but also to study how their characteristics — including size, shape and brightness — are shaped by their cosmic environments, such as whether they reside in isolation or in crowded regions. "That tells us a lot about what influenced them as they evolved," Kartaltepe said. Alongside the catalog, the COSMOS-Web team has published a series of scientific papers exploring the data. One study, posted to the preprint archive arXiv on Wednesday (June 4), examines the most luminous galaxies at the centers of galaxy groups, tracing how their structure and star forming activity have co-evolved over the past 12 billion years. A key science goal of the project was to map the earliest structures during the Reionization Era (which fell more than 13 billion years ago) when the first galaxies ignited and began clearing the thick hydrogen fog that blanketed the early cosmos. To achieve this, Kartaltepe and her team plan early galaxies as tracers to measure the size of "reionization bubbles," vast regions where light from stars and galaxies carved clearings in the primordial haze. "That's not something we finished yet," Kartaltepe said. "But that was the main goal, and something that we're really excited about." Another paper, which was also posted to arXiv on Wednesday, tests a machine learning technique that can estimate the physical properties of galaxies in the massive dataset. The team also developed a new method to measure the brightness of distant galaxies more accurately. Unlike traditional techniques that simply sum the light within a fixed area, this approach models how light is spread across a galaxy, enabling more precise measurements that allow researchers to combine JWST images with blurrier ground-based data without losing important details. Related Stories: — James Webb Space Telescope finds coldest exoplanet ever seen, and it orbits a dead star — James Webb Space Telescope captures stunning images of bright auroras on Jupiter (video) — Calling citizen scientists! Help NASA's Galaxy Zoo classify galaxies seen by James Webb Space Telescope Three more studies detail the team's data processing efforts over the past two years, a meticulous process involving aligning and cleaning more than 10,000 individual images. As a brand-new observatory, the JWST brought unexpected challenges. The telescope's images included unforeseen artifacts, such as noise patterns and distortions, which the team had to carefully correct. Despite these hurdles, the JWST outperformed pre-launch models predicting how faint or distant galaxies it could detect, said Kartaltepe. "The reality turned out to be better — we were able to go deeper than what we expected." The catalog holds "incredible potential," she added. "There's still so much we don't know."
Yahoo
05-05-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
Almost Every Speck of Light in This Incredible Image Is a Galaxy
If you ever want to get a bit of perspective, there's very little that's more humbling than a good deep field image – and JWST has just dropped a real showstopper. In the latest image release, the powerful space telescope gazed back nearly 12 billion light-years into a tiny patch of sky, less than a fifth of the width of the full Moon. That little patch of sky is teeming with glittering lights. It looks a lot like any patch of the sky seen when you look up from the ground on a cloudless night, with one major, jaw-dropping difference. Most of the lights in the new JWST-Hubble composite image are not bright stars, but galaxies, stretching back almost as far across space-time as the beginning of the Universe. You can tell the difference, because only the stars have the pointy diffraction spikes that are characteristic of a JWST image. This pattern is generated when light from a concentrated point source bends around the edges of the telescope. The light in galaxies is much less concentrated, so it doesn't produce the same effect. This makes it easy to identify foreground stars in JWST images, and tell them apart from background objects. The focus of this particular image is a group of galaxies concentrated just below the center, glowing with a kind of golden light. The light from that group of galaxies has traveled for around 6.5 billion years to reach us – nearly half the 13.8 billion-year age of the Universe. The observations were taken as part of the COSMOS-Web survey, a project aimed at cataloguing groups of galaxies to better understand the evolution of the Universe, which includes the cosmic web. The distribution of galaxies throughout the Universe isn't random or higgledy-piggledy; they organize themselves into clusters, connected by an invisible cosmic web of dark matter and hydrogen. Combining JWST data with X-ray data from the Chandra X-ray Observatory reveals just how large this group is, the most massive identified in the view field. The hot gas that suffuses the cluster glows in X-radiation powerfully enough for Chandra to detect. There is, however, a lot more to be seen in the image, if you know how to look. In a catalog compiled from these data, an international team of astronomers led by astrophysicist Greta Toni of the University of Bologna has identified 1,678 groups of galaxies. Not 1,678 galaxies – 1,678 groups. There is also nothing special about this little patch of sky, measuring just 6.44 by 6.44 arcminutes. The full Moon, for context, is around 30 arcminutes across. Every other tiny patch of sky should be just as teeming with galaxies, thousands upon thousands that can be imaged in an area smaller than your pinky nail. If that's not awe-inspiring, we don't know what is. If you want to remind yourself daily how small you are, you can download wallpaper-sized versions of the deep field on the ESA's JWST website, and the most recent paper on Astronomy & Astrophysics. The Eta Aquariid Meteor Shower Is Just About to Peak 'Super-Earths' May Be Surprisingly Common, Scientists Reveal JWST Confirms Coldest Exoplanet Ever Found, Circling Its Dead Star
India Today
30-04-2025
- Science
- India Today
Every dot in this Webb telescope picture is a galaxy. Can you count them?
The James Webb Space Telescope continues to marvel scientists and ordinary citizens alike as it reveals the intricate design of the universe and unravels never-before-seen cosmic latest image shows thousands of galaxies packed together in European Space Agency (ESA) said that these galaxies glow with white-gold light. "We see this galaxy group as it appeared when the Universe was 6.5 billion years old, a little less than half the Universe's current age," ESA added. n area of deep space with thousands of galaxies in various shapes and sizes on a black background. (Photo: ESA) advertisement The patch of the sky scanned by the Webb Telescope containing thousands of these galaxies is called the COSMOS-Web field, where Cosmos stands for Cosmic Evolution Survey that has been done by a group of telescopes including the Hubble and the XMM-Newton space survey aims to understand how massive structures like galaxy clusters came to be. More than half of the galaxies in our Universe belong to galaxy groups like the one pictured here. COSMOS-Web is a 255-hour Webb Treasury programme that maps 0.54 square degrees, a little more than two-and-a-half times the area covered by three full moons, of the COSMOS field using four NIRCam filters."Studying galaxy groups is critical for understanding how individual galaxies link up to form galaxy clusters, the largest gravitationally bound structures in the Universe. Belonging to a galaxy group can also alter the course of a galaxy's evolution through mergers and gravitational interactions," ESA added in a statement. These galaxies glow with white-gold light as seen by the Webb Telescope. (Photo: Nasa) advertisementThe image combines data from Webb's Near-InfraRed Camera (NIRCam) instrument with further infrared observations from Hubble infrared capabilities and sensitive instruments have pushed the search for galaxy groups farther back into cosmic history, revealing galaxy groups as far back as when the Universe was only 1.9 billion years old – just 14% of its current age.
