The very far away galaxies, that are behind the more nearby galaxy cluster, have their light distorted by the fact that the cluster is bending spacetime. The reason they are stretched out is due to the gravitational lensing effect I mentioned earlier. The second is related to those stretched out and strangely shaped galaxies. Almost every tiny one-pixel speck in that image is a galaxy, and probably some of them, especially the very red ones that we couldn’t see with other telescopes, are galaxies from the first 500 million years of the universe. The first is just how many galaxies there are in the image. There were three things that stood out to me personally in the image. What stands out for you in this “deepest field image” of the universe captured by the JWST? This helps us see galaxies even farther back in time than we would in an emptier region of space! Very much like a magnifying glass, the light behind the cluster gets bent but also magnified, which means that galaxies very far away actually appear brighter than they would if there were not something more massive in the way. The cluster and the galaxies within it are very pretty on their own, but more importantly, that cluster has so much mass that it is something called a strong gravitational lens – this is an effect due to general relativity whereby any mass in the universe distorts spacetime. The big white galaxies in the center of the image are part of that cluster, and we also expect that it is surrounded by an even larger amount of dark matter. This location includes a galaxy cluster that is about 4 billion light-years away. Galaxy cluster SMACS 0723, as imaged by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope.
Why did NASA choose this location for the first image? I was so excited that I didn’t sleep very well on Monday night after seeing the first image, I woke up thinking about these tiny, wonderful galaxies and anticipating what we will learn and what else we can do with this telescope. These images are just stunningly beautiful. As someone who is lucky enough to think about how galaxies form and evolve every day, they continue to surprise me. There is just so much detail in this image that we have never seen before. What was your first reaction to this image taken by the JWST?Īwe. “I expect JWST will be at least as transformational, and I can’t wait to see what creative things people will do with the telescope.” “I was just starting graduate school when the Hubble Deep Field was released, and that had such a tremendous impact on our understanding of galaxies and the universe,” Wechsler said. Upon seeing JWST’s first trove of images, Stanford astrophysicist and cosmologist Risa Wechsler was reminded of the initial glimpse of the universe captured by another space observatory many years ago. Another reveals a ghostly landscape of “mountains” and “valleys” carved by stellar winds in a nearby star-forming region in the Carina Nebula. The first of them – previewed by the Biden Administration at the White House on Monday – reveal the spangle of stars and galaxies contained within a speck of sky no bigger than a grain of sand held out at arm’s length. The infrared images represent humanity’s deepest and sharpest glimpse into the early universe. Risa Wechsler (Image credit: Harrison Truong)
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