There are two new images from NASA's james wbb space telescope. There are objects from more than 13 billion years ago in both images, and one offers a much wider field of view than the First Deep Field image. Some of the first images from a major collaboration of astronomy and other academic researchers teaming with NASA and global partners to uncover new insights about the universe are shown.
The team has identified one particularly exciting object that they think is being observed as it was just a few hundred million years after the Bigbang.
A peer-reviewed journal will publish the finding after it has been published on the arXiv. If the finding is true, it would be one of the earliest, if not the earliest, galaxies ever observed.
Some pinwheels, others blobby toddlers, still others gauzy swirls of do-si-doing neighbors can be seen in the images. The pictures were taken from a patch of sky near the handle of the Big Dipper. The same area of sky was seen by the Hubble Space Telescope.
Finkelstein is an astronomer at The University of Texas at Austin and the principal investigator for the Cosmic.
More than 100 people from the U.S. and nine other countries are collaborating on the project. The universe was less than 5% of its current age during a time known as reionization.
Before the telescope data came in, a researcher at UT Austin created simulations to help the team develop methods for analyzing the new imagery. The real images were processed by a group of people.
A mosaic of individual frames took about 24 hours to be collected using the telescope's main imager. The new image covers an area of the sky eight times larger than the First Deep Field image. The Texas Advanced Computing Center used the world's most powerful computer to remove background noise and artifacts for the initial image processing.
Finkelstein said that high- performance computing power made it possible to combine multiple images and hold the frames in memory at the same time.
The other image was taken with a camera. MIRI has a smaller field of view but operates at a higher spatial resolution than previous mid-IR telescopes. Cosmic dust glowing from star-forming galaxies and black holes at small distances and light from older stars at large distances can be seen with the help of MIri.
More information: Steven L. Finkelstein et al, A Long Time Ago in a Galaxy Far, Far Away: A Candidate z ~ 14 Galaxy in Early JWST CEERS Imaging, arXiv (2022). arXiv:2207.12474 [astro-ph.GA], arxiv.org/abs/2207.12474 Journal information: arXiv
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