NASA and ESA's James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) continues to amaze and this time with an incredible image that reveals previously undiscovered galaxies near the North Ecliptic Pole. The image is one of the medium-deep wide-field images from the Prime Extragalactic Areas for Reionization and Lensing Science (PEARLS) program.
It depicts millions of galaxies spanning a range of distances that reaches even the distant regions of the universe, showing as well the stars in the Milky Way. PEARLS co-investigator Rolf Jansen, an astronomer at Arizona State University said in a statement via a NASA blog that the initial PEARLS photographs are mind-blowing.
PEARLS Program's Images of the Earliest Galaxies
The Hubble Space Telescope and ground-based telescopes have given breathtaking views of galaxies for decades, but this all changed in December 2021, when the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) launched and completed commissioning in the first part of 2022.
As SciTech Daily reported, astronomers are now seeing the cosmos in new ways thanks to the telescope's Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam) instrument. It is Webb's primary imager, which covers the infrared wavelength range of 0.6 to 5 microns.
NIRCam detects light from the earliest stars and galaxies in the universe, as well as the population of stars in neighboring galaxies and young stars in the Milky Way and Kuiper Belt objects.
Researchers can observe some of these very distant objects thanks to the PEARLS program's photos of the oldest galaxies, which indicate the degree of gravitational lensing of objects in the backdrop of enormous clusters of galaxies. The scientists used magnificent multicolor photos to locate interacting galaxies with active nuclei in one of these rather deep regions.
The first thing they noticed in these new images is that numerous nearby galaxies that were completely invisible to Hubble are now visible in JWST's images. Starlight from these galaxies has been stretched because they are so far away. The team used the JWST to study the time domain field of the North Ecliptic Pole, which is clearly visible due to its placement in the sky.
The first observations consisted of two overlapping tiles, creating a picture of objects as weak as the brightness of ten fireflies at the moon's distance. Webb's final limit is one or two fireflies. The image's weakest reddest objects are distant galaxies dating back to the first few hundred million years after the Big Bang.
Processing Data from JWST to Share It With Scientists Around the World
The team analyzed the JWST images to share the data with other scientists around the world, the press release reported. They were surprised by its exquisite resolution.
They are primarily interested in knowing how galaxies, like the Milky Way, were formed. The way to do that is by looking far back in time at how galaxies came together and studying their evolution to trace their path from the Big Bang.
Researchers were mind-blown by the images as they did not expect to see a treasure trove of distant galaxies at that quality. More so, it was unexpected that they would be able to process the data of these galaxies to understand how they grew.
Graduate Associate Rosalia O'Brien designed algorithms to measure the faint light between stars and galaxies that first caught the eye. She noted that the diffuse light she measured has cosmological significance, encoding the universe's history.
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