An international team of scientists with significant contribution from the Technical University of Munich has built an improved model for the mass distribution of the galaxy cluster. The foreground galaxy cluster magnifies the images of the background galaxies. The model predicts that one family of multiple images belongs to a galaxy that is 13 billion years old.
The first image to be released by the James Webb Space Telescope was of a lens. Multiple images of these are produced by magnifying the light from the background galaxies. There were at least 19 multiple images of six background sources. There are now 27 additional multiple images from other sources.
"We used recent data from this brand new telescope to model the lensing effect of SMACS0723 with great accuracy," says Gabriel Bartosch Caminha, a fellow at TUM. Data from the Hubble Space Telescope and MUSE were used to build a "pre-JWST" lens model and then refined it with newly available JWST near-IR images. The image of the JWST allows us to substantially refine our lens mass model.
The model is one of the most accurate.
The scientists used their mass model to estimate how far away the lensed sources are from each other. It was found that one of them was at an amazing distance of 13 Gyrs. The luminosity of this galaxy is magnified by a factor of 20 in total.
To study these primordial objects, it's important to understand the lensing effect of the foreground cluster. Sherry Suyu is a Visiting Scholar at the Sinica Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics and a professor at the TUM. Thanks to our accurate model, we were able to see a lot of strongly lensed galaxies in the images.
One of the most accurate models for the mass distribution of the foreground cluster is the new model. The models of the lens are made public for follow-up studies. Suyu says they are excited about it. We are looking forward to the future observations of other strong lensing galaxy clusters. We will be able to better constrain the distribution of the mass of the galaxy clusters.
More information: G. B. Caminha et al, First JWST observations of a gravitational lens: Mass model of new multiple images with near-infrared observations of SMACS~J0723.3−7327. arXiv:2207.07567v1 [astro-ph.GA], arxiv.org/abs/2207.07567
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