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.
Alongside the catalog, the COSMOS-Web team has published a series of scientific papers exploring the data.
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.
Despite these hurdles, the JWST outperformed pre-launch models predicting how faint or distant galaxies it could detect, said Kartaltepe.
The largest map of the early universe to date has been revealed by astronomers using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). This expansive cosmic panorama provides firsthand access to the ancient universe for both seasoned scientists and inquisitive stargazers.
The photos are from COSMOS-Web, the biggest observation program the James Webb Space Telescope launched. The telescope’s largest observation area to date, it covered an area of the sky the size of three full moons positioned side by side. Through the stitching of over 10,000 exposures, the survey discovered almost 800,000 galaxies, many of which are bright from the early stages of the universe. Using the wealth of information gathered from this endeavor, the team published the largest contiguous image ever taken by the JWST on Thursday, June 5, along with a free interactive catalog that describes the characteristics of every galaxy — a cosmic record that is both vast and intricately detailed.
“Astrophysicist Jeyhan Kartaltepe of the Rochester Institute of Technology in New York, who is the lead researcher of COSMOS-Web, told Space . com, “I don’t know if the James Webb Space Telescope will ever cover an area of this size again, so I think it’ll be a good reference and a good data set that people will use for many years.”. It is now hoped that anyone at any institution will be able to use this data for their own scientific research. “,”.
The JWST launched in 2021, and the global COSMOS-Web team, which included almost 50 researchers from various institutions worldwide, received more than 200 hours of observation time—the most of any project in the telescope’s first year. A broader cosmic canvas was captured by COSMOS-Web, bringing to light ten times as many galaxies as astronomers had predicted from these early epochs, whereas many JWST studies focused on narrow, deep slices of the sky.
Maximilien Franco, a postdoctoral researcher in astrophysics at the University of Hertfordshire in the United Kingdom, said, “It was amazing to make galaxies visible on our computers that were previously invisible at other wavelengths.”. K. stated in a declaration.
Because of the JWST’s broad field of view, astronomers can not only catalog galaxies that are far away but also investigate how their cosmic environments—such as whether they are isolated or crowded—affect their size, shape, and brightness. Kartaltepe stated, “That tells us a lot about what influenced them as they evolved.”.
The COSMOS-Web team has also released a number of scientific papers that examine the data in addition to the catalog. The most luminous galaxies at the centers of galaxy groups are examined in one study, which was uploaded to the preprint archive arXiv on Wednesday, June 4. It charts the co-evolution of their structure and star-forming activity over the previous 12 billion years.
Mapping the earliest structures from the Reionization Era (which ended over 13 billion years ago), when the first galaxies formed and started to clear the dense hydrogen fog that covered the early universe, was one of the project’s main scientific objectives. In order to accomplish this, Kartaltepe and her group use early galaxies as tracers to gauge the size of “reionization bubbles,” which are enormous areas where star and galaxy light carved out clearings in the primordial haze.
“That’s not something we finished yet,” Kartaltepe stated. However, that was the primary objective, and we are quite enthusiastic about it. “,”.
A machine learning method that can estimate the physical properties of galaxies in the enormous dataset is tested in another paper that was also uploaded to arXiv on Wednesday. Additionally, the group created a novel technique to more precisely measure the brightness of far-off galaxies. In contrast to conventional methods that merely add up the light in a specific region, this method simulates the distribution of light throughout a galaxy, allowing for more accurate measurements that let scientists merge JWST pictures with less clear ground-based data without losing crucial information.
The team’s painstaking two-year data processing efforts, which included aligning and cleaning over 10,000 individual images, are described in three additional studies. Being a new observatory, the JWST presented unforeseen difficulties. The team had to carefully correct the telescope’s images for unanticipated artifacts like distortions and noise patterns.
According to Kartaltepe, the JWST performed better than pre-launch models that predicted how faint or distant galaxies it could detect in spite of these obstacles. We were able to delve deeper than we had anticipated, so the reality ended up being better. “..”.
The catalog has “incredible potential,” she continued.
“We still don’t know a lot. “.”.
