{"id":78187,"date":"2025-05-06T04:13:10","date_gmt":"2025-05-06T04:13:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/78187\/"},"modified":"2025-05-06T04:13:10","modified_gmt":"2025-05-06T04:13:10","slug":"almost-every-speck-of-light-in-this-incredible-image-is-a-galaxy-sciencealert","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/78187\/","title":{"rendered":"Almost Every Speck of Light in This Incredible Image Is a Galaxy : ScienceAlert"},"content":{"rendered":"

If you ever want to get a bit of perspective, there’s very little that’s more humbling than a good deep field image \u2013 and JWST has just dropped a real showstopper.<\/p>\n

In the latest image release, the powerful space telescope gazed back nearly 12 billion light-years into a tiny patch of sky, less than a fifth of the width of the full Moon. That little patch of sky is teeming with glittering lights.<\/p>\n

It looks a lot like any patch of the sky seen when you look up from the ground on a cloudless night, with one major, jaw-dropping difference.<\/p>\n

Most of the lights in the new JWST-Hubble composite image are not bright stars, but galaxies, stretching back almost as far across space-time as the beginning of the Universe.<\/p>\n

\"AnThe full deep field. You can download the full-size image here<\/a>. (ESA\/Webb, NASA & CSA, G. Gozaliasl, A. Koekemoer, M. Franco, and the COSMOS-Web team)<\/p>\n

You can tell the difference, because only the stars have the pointy diffraction spikes<\/a> that are characteristic of a JWST image. This pattern is generated when light from a concentrated point source bends around the edges of the telescope. The light in galaxies is much less concentrated, so it doesn’t produce the same effect.<\/p>\n

This makes it easy to identify foreground stars in JWST images, and tell them apart from background objects.<\/p>\n

The focus of this particular image is a group of galaxies concentrated just below the center, glowing with a kind of golden light. The light from that group of galaxies has traveled for around 6.5 billion years to reach us \u2013 nearly half the 13.8 billion-year age of the Universe.<\/p>\n

The observations were taken as part of the COSMOS-Web survey, a project aimed at cataloguing groups of galaxies to better understand the evolution of the Universe, which includes the cosmic web<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The distribution of galaxies throughout the Universe isn’t random or higgledy-piggledy; they organize themselves into clusters, connected by an invisible cosmic web<\/a> of dark matter<\/a> and hydrogen.<\/p>\n

Combining JWST data with X-ray data from the Chandra X-ray Observatory<\/a> reveals just how large this group is, the most massive identified in the view field. The hot gas that suffuses the cluster glows in X-radiation powerfully enough for Chandra to detect.<\/p>\n

frameborder=”0\u2033 allow=”accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share” referrerpolicy=”strict-origin-when-cross-origin” allowfullscreen><\/p>\n

There is, however, a lot more to be seen in the image, if you know how to look. In a catalog compiled from these data<\/a>, an international team of astronomers led by astrophysicist Greta Toni of the University of Bologna has identified 1,678 groups of galaxies. Not 1,678 galaxies \u2013 1,678 groups.<\/p>\n

There is also nothing special about this little patch of sky, measuring just 6.44 by 6.44 arcminutes<\/a>. The full Moon, for context, is around 30 arcminutes across<\/a>. Every other tiny patch of sky should be just as teeming with galaxies, thousands upon thousands that can be imaged in an area smaller than your pinky nail.<\/p>\n

If that’s not awe-inspiring, we don’t know what is.<\/p>\n

If you want to remind yourself daily how small you are, you can download wallpaper-sized versions of the deep field on the ESA’s JWST website<\/a>, and the most recent paper on Astronomy & Astrophysics<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"If you ever want to get a bit of perspective, there’s very little that’s more humbling than a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":78188,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[120,70,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-78187","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-science","8":"tag-msft-content","9":"tag-science","10":"tag-uk","11":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114458945325078943","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/78187","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=78187"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/78187\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/78188"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=78187"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=78187"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=78187"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}