Never-before-seen details of a part of space where three galaxies merge have been revealed in a mesmerizing new look at the cosmos.
The fascinating photo is the latest deep-field image taken by NASA’s new super space telescope, James Webb.
It captures an area known as Pandora’s Cluster, where several already massive galaxies converge to form a megacluster so large that gravity distorts the spacetime around it.
“The ancient myth of Pandora is about human curiosity and discoveries that delineate the past from the future, which I think is a fitting connection to the new realms of the universe that Webb is opening up, including this deep-field image of Pandora’s Cluster,” said University of Pittsburgh astronomer Rachel Bezanson.
“When the images of Pandora’s Cluster first came in from Webb, we were honestly a little star struck.
Beautiful: This fascinating image is the latest deep-field image taken by NASA’s new super space telescope, James Webb. It captures an area known as Pandora’s Cluster, where three already massive galaxies converge to form a megacluster
“There was so much detail in the foreground cluster and so many distant lens galaxies that I found myself getting lost in the frame. Webb exceeded our expectations.”
The new view of Pandora’s Cluster merges four Webb snapshots into one panoramic image, showing about 50,000 sources of near-infrared light.
It acts like a magnifying glass because it uses the combined mass of the galaxy clusters to create a powerful gravitational lens – a natural magnifying effect of gravity.
This method has the potential to open a new frontier in the study of cosmology and galaxy evolution, astronomers say, because it could be possible to observe much more distant galaxies in the early universe.
Natural magnification is one thing, but how distant galaxies appear is also affected by so-called gravitational lensing.
This is a phenomenon caused by an object’s influence on the space-time around it, making distant galaxies look very different from those in the foreground.
Massive objects such as clusters of galaxies warp and warp spacetime so much that the light from these distant objects eventually bends or bends, creating strange shapes or bizarre optical illusions.
For example, at the bottom right of the new Webb image are hundreds of distant lens galaxies that look like faint curved lines.
If you zoom in on the region, you see more and more.
“Pandora’s Cluster, as imaged by Webb, shows us a stronger, wider, deeper, better lens than we’ve ever seen before,” said astronomer Ivo Labbe of Melbourne’s Swinburne University of Technology.
‘My first reaction to the image was that it was so beautiful, it looked like a simulation of the formation of galaxies.
The new view of Pandora’s Cluster merges four Webb snapshots into one panoramic image, containing approximately 50,000 sources of near-infrared light. Pictured is the new telescope
“We had to remind ourselves that this was real data and that we are now working in a new era of astronomy.”
The megacluster Pandora, which is the product of violent and simultaneous galaxy collisions over 350 million years, was first spotted by Hubble in 2011.
It is of immense interest to astronomers, because when huge clusters of galaxies collide in such a way, the resulting mess is a treasure trove of information.
Webb scientists used the telescope’s Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam) to capture the cluster with exposures of 4-6 hours, for a total of about 30 hours of observation time.
They now plan to go through the image data with a fine comb before selecting galaxies for follow-up observation with Webb’s Near-Infrared Spectrograph (NIRSpec).
This will yield accurate distance measurements and detailed information about the compositions of the lens galaxies, which experts hope will provide new insights into the early era of galaxy assembly and evolution.
They plan to reveal this data in the summer.
“This is just the beginning of all the amazing Webb science to come,” said Gabriel Brammer of the Cosmic Dawn Center at the Niels Bohr Institute at the University of Copenhagen.
Webb was launched from Guyana Space Center on Christmas Day 2021 with the aim of looking back in time to the dawn of the universe.
Astronomers hope the $10bn (£7.4bn) observatory will be able to reveal what happened just a few hundred million years after the big bang.
The observatory will spend more than a decade in an area of gravitational balance between the sun and Earth called L2.
While there, it will explore the universe in the infrared spectrum, allowing it to see through clouds of gas and dust where stars are being born.
The James Webb Telescope: NASA’s $10 billion telescope is designed to detect light from the earliest stars and galaxies
The James Webb telescope has been described as a “time machine” that could help unlock the secrets of our universe.
The telescope will be used to look back at the first galaxies born in the early universe more than 13.5 billion years ago, and to observe the sources of stars, exoplanets and even the moons and planets of our solar system.
The massive telescope, which has already cost more than $7bn (£5bn), is thought to be a successor to the orbiting Hubble Space Telescope
The James Webb telescope and most of its instruments have an operating temperature of about 40 Kelvin – about minus 387 Fahrenheit (minus 233 degrees Celsius).
It is the world’s largest and most powerful orbital space telescope, capable of looking back 100-200 million years after the Big Bang.
The orbiting infrared observatory is designed to be about 100 times more powerful than its predecessor, the Hubble Space Telescope.
NASA likes to think of James Webb as a successor to Hubble rather than a replacement, as the two will be working together for a while.
The Hubble telescope was launched on April 24, 1990 via the space shuttle Discovery from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
It orbits Earth at about 17,000 mph (27,300 km/h) in low Earth orbit at about 340 miles altitude.
.