The James Webb (JWST) and Hubble telescopes have joined forces to capture an image showing the astounding number of celestial objects that populate our Universe. Almost all of them are distant galaxies hundreds of millions and billions of light years away.
The image shows a countless number of galaxies of all possible shapes and types. It shows galaxies with thin spiral arms and curved disks, galaxies that are smooth and almost devoid of visible features, and even galaxies that interact and merge with each other, taking on very unusual shapes.
The colors associated with the age of the stars and distance are also fascinating. Younger luminaries appear bluer and older luminaries appear redder. In turn, the farther away a galaxy is from Earth, the redder it appears.
In addition to distant galaxies, the image also includes several much closer objects. We are talking about stars located in our Milky Way. They can be recognized by their characteristic diffraction beams. This is an optical effect that occurs due to the way the secondary mirror is mounted on reflector telescopes.
A group of galaxies located just below the center of the frame is worth paying attention to. They are glowing with white-gold light. We see this group of galaxies as it was just 6.5 billion years after the Big Bang. At that time, the Sun did not yet exist.
More than half of the galaxies belong to similar groups. Studying them is crucial to understanding how individual galaxies connect to each other to form clusters, the largest gravitationally-bound structures in the Universe. Group membership can also change the course of galaxy evolution through mergers and gravitational interactions.
The image was taken as part of the COSMOS-Web project by combining infrared data from JWST and optical data from Hubble. Its main goal is to understand how massive structures such as galaxy clusters originated. JWST’s capabilities have allowed scientists to move even further back in cosmic history and discover groups of galaxies at a time when the Universe was 1.9 billion years old — just 14% of its current age.
Earlier we reported on how James Webb discovered a black hole hiding in the center of a neighboring galaxy.
According to Esawebb
