Written by Samah Labib
Wednesday, February 15, 2023 10:00 PM
Astronomers used it European Space AgencyThe star system LEDA 2046648 is located a billion light-years away from our system in the constellation Hercules, and contains thousands of galaxies, trillions of stars and countless planets, according to the engadget report.
The European Space Agency released the image on January 31, and the New York Times highlighted it this week. The space agency described it as just a calibration image “to verify the capabilities of the telescope as it was prepared for scientific operations, and it was captured by astronomers at the European Space Agency (ESA) on May 22, 2022 with an infrared camera.” Webb’s Near Infrared Telescope (NIRCam).
This powerful camera can detect wavelengths Infrared The longer ones are caused by light coming from far away. The redshift describes the stretching of the wavelength of light as it moves away from us, increasing until it appears redder than expected. This is caused by the expansion of the universe: distant systems such as LEDA 2046648 continue to move away from Earth.
Most of the visible blobs surrounding LEDA 2046648 are also galaxies, although many stars can be distinguished by their diffraction height patterns, and some objects in the image may be as old as 300 million years after the Big Bang.
Of course, any image a billion light-years away means we’ve been seeing the galaxy’s light for a billion years, so astronomers are keen to study early galaxies like this (and even older galaxies) to help explain what kinds of stars condensed from the Big Bang – and how supermassive black holes ended up. in the centers of most galaxies.