Posted by Heba El-Sayed
Monday, March 13, 2023 09:00 PM
One of the main goals ofJames Webb Space Telescope It is observing some of the oldest galaxies in the universe, and to do so it must be able to see very distant objects.
But looking at a particular very old galaxy in detail is only half the problem.
To truly understand the early stages of the universe, astronomers also need to know how these very old galaxies are distributed so that they can understand the large-scale structure of the universe.
That’s the goal of the COSMOS-Web programme, which uses James Webb to scan a wide region of the sky looking for these rare ancient galaxies.
It aims to study up to million galaxies Over 255 hours of observation time, using both a near infrared webcam (NIRCam) and medium infrared instrument camera (MIRI) according to Digitartlends.
While there is still a lot of observations to be made, COSMOS-Web researchers recently shared some of their first findings.
“It’s very exciting to get the first data from the telescope for COSMOS-Web,” principal investigator Cihan Kartaltepe of Rochester Institute of Technology said in a statement. “Everything works beautifully, and the data is better than we expected.”
The first images include four galaxies, chosen because they represent the different types of galaxies the survey will find. There is a tight spiral galaxy, like our own Milky Way, and a similar galaxy that is undergoing strong star formation. There is also a galaxy that appears to have recently merged, and one galaxy that is a bend. Its light is due to gravitational lensing.
This is just a small slice of the galaxies the survey has identified so far.
The image shows observations taken between January 5 and 6 of this year, indicating how large and detailed the final full survey is.
This mosaic consists of six points by telescope, out of a total of 77 points that will be made in April and May this year, with another 69 points in December 2023 and January 2024.
“This first snapshot from COSMOS-Web contains about 25,000 galaxies — a staggering number even larger than what is found in the Hubble Ultra-Deep Field,” said principal investigator Caitlin Casey of the University of Texas at Austin. “It is one of the largest JWST images ever taken. pick it up”.
However it only represents 4% of the data we will have for the full survey, when finished this deep field will be stunningly large and beautiful.”