The shape of the telescope's lens has revealed 42 new, lensed images of galaxies, which may help us to see the very first ones.
In a White House event held on July 11th, President Joe Biden revealed a deep-field image of the James Webb Space Telescope. Three new papers were uploaded to the community's preprint server within a week of the image's release.
We were sideswiped. The astronomer at the University of Arizona and co-author of a paper told Space.com. Normally we have an advance warning, but no one saw this coming.
Gallery: James Webb Space Telescope's 1st photos
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The SMACS J0723 is among a group of galaxy clusters that are being looked at by the astronomer. There wasn't anything special about SMACS J0723 until now.
She said that it was chosen because it was a relatively unknown target.
A very large object's gravity warps space into a shape similar to an optical lens, resulting in light from behind the lens being distorted and magnified in brightness. A large amount of mass is packed into a relatively small volume with a diameter of about 3 to 5 million light-years.
The Hubble Space Telescope and the Herschel Space Observatory had previously found a few lensed images of background galaxies. The hunt is taken to a whole new level by the man.
42 new lensed images were found in the background of a new deep-field image. These 42 images represent 19 individual galaxies because of the gnatational lens. There were 27 new lensed images counted by the Gabriel Caminha team.
Regardless of the final tally, these lensed images allow scientists to fine tune a map of how matter is distributed in the SMACS J0723 cluster. Most of the mass is centered on the most massive galaxy in the cluster, according to a new paper.
We can use the models to describe the magnification of the images.
A distant object known as GN-z11 has a redshift of 11.09, which makes it the most distant confirmed object. As the universe expands between a distant object and the viewer, the wavelength of light is stretched. The closer the light source is to the redshift factor.
HD1 was found at a redshift of 13 and is 300 million years old. There is another candidate galaxy at redshift 13 named GLASS-z11. Astronomers have yet to confirm the redshifts of HD1 and GLASS-z11.
It's not known if any of the lensed galaxies seen in SMACS J0723 are more distant than Gn-z11 or HD1. They are interested in mapping a phenomenon called the "critical curve," because it is along these curves that the gravitational lens applies the greatest magnifying power, and where astronomer have the best chance of seeing the first galaxies.
A factor of 10 is not enough to see the first galaxies. The critical curve is where things are magnified by thousands of times.
A critical curve is similar to a topographical map of the Earth. The higher the lines are bunched together, the taller the spot on the surface. A critical curve is where the lines of potential bunch up and the stronger that potential is. The location and shape of the images can be used to see where the critical curve lies.
We will find the highest redshift galaxies when we look along the critical curve where the magnification is highest.
The modeling can show us about the cluster's past.
The mass distribution was a tad longer than expected. "Maybe that says something about the cluster's merger history, and we can learn something about cluster formation as a whole, which happens in a very chaotic environment where gravity from all these galaxies is pulling on each other."
The authors of the other two papers will have to go through the peer review process in order to see their results published. Data from the NIRISS should help scientists determine how far away the lensed galaxies are. The deep-field image was captured by a camera.
SMACS J0723 wasn't the center of attention before it was imaged. "Now, suddenly, there's paper after paper on it, which really speaks to how powerful Webb is, to reveal things that we didn't know before."
You can find the preprint of the paper here. Here and here are the other papers.
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