by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope continues to amaze, this time with an exquisite image revealing never-before-seen galaxies in an area known as the North Pole of the Ecliptic.
The image is one of the few medium-deep, wide-field images of our cosmos and shows thousands galaxies across a bewildering range of distances, stretching to the furthest reaches of the universe, while being studded with stars of our own Milky Way. The new James Webb Space Telescope (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 images from PEARLS,” said Rolf Jansen, an Arizona State University astronomer and PEARLS co-investigator, in a declaration.
“I didn’t know when I selected this field near the North Pole of the ecliptic that it would produce such a treasure trove of distant galaxies and that we would get direct clues about the processes by which galaxies assemble and grow,” he said. “I can see streams and tails and shells and halos of stars in their periphery, the leftovers of their bricks.”
Gallery: The first photos of the James Webb Space Telescope
Webb’s near-infrared camera (NIRCam) captured the glittering scene, which covers a portion of the sky measuring 2 percent of the area covered by the full moon. The image was constructed using eight different colors of near-infrared light collected by NIRCam, augmented with three colors of ultraviolet and visible light from the Hubble Space Telescope.
“Medium-deep” refers to the faintest objects that can be seen in this image, which are about 1 billion times fainter than those that can be seen with the naked eye, according to a NASA declaration. The PEARLS program focuses on gravitational lens of objects against the background of galactic clusters; these clusters are so massive that they warp space-time, amplifying the light of the objects behind them.
The location of this particular sky field, at the north pole of the ecliptic, means it can also be monitored at any time of the year and not be blocked by the sun like JWST orbits. Regular views mean that JWST can see what’s showing up in the field, promising opportunities for time-domain astronomy, which focuses on how astronomical objects change over time.
“Such monitoring will enable the discovery of time-varying objects such as distant explosive supernovae and luminous accretion gas around black holes in active galaxies, which should be detectable at greater distances than previously,” said Anton Koekemoer, astronomer at Space Telescope Science. Institute. (STScI) in Maryland, which operates JWST, and a member of the PEARLS team, he said in the statement.
The research is described in a paper published Wednesday (December 14) in the Astronomical Journal.
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