In addition to providing new information about objects like exoplanets and giving new views of some famous space scenes, the James Webb Space Telescope is also being used to observe large patches of the sky. The first results from the PEARLS survey show an area of the sky called the North Ecliptic Pole.

Around 2% of the sky can be seen in this image, which was captured by both the Near-Infrared Camera and the Advanced Camera for Surveys. There are thousands of galaxies in this part of the PEARLS survey. The image can be seen on the website.

A swath of sky measuring 2% of the area covered by the full moon imaged with Webb’s Near-Infrared Camera.
A swath of sky measuring 2% of the area covered by the full moon was imaged with Webb’s Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam) in eight filters, and with Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) and Wide-Field Camera 3 (WFC3) in three filters that together span the 0.25 to 5-micron wavelength range. This image represents a portion of the full PEARLS field, which will be about four times larger. NASA, ESA, CSA, A. Pagan (STScI) & R. Jansen (ASU). SCIENCE: R. Jansen, J. Summers, R. O'Brien, and R. Windhorst (Arizona State University); A. Robotham (ICRAR/UWA); A. Koekemoer (STScI); C. Willmer (UofA); and the PEARLS team.

The lead author of the research said he has worked with a large international team of scientists for over two decades. bb's images are beyond my expectations They allow us to measure the total amount of light produced and the number of stars in the sky. The light is not as bright as the sky between the galaxies.

Some of the interesting features being studied by the PEARLS survey include the accretion disks which form around supermassive black holes in the center of galaxies, a pair of overlaping galaxies, and some extremely old galaxies with very high redshift.

The first PEARLS images blew me away. When I selected this field near the North Ecliptic Pole, I didn't know that it would yield such a treasure trove of distant galaxies. I can see the leftovers of their building blocks in the stars outside.

The research can be found in the journal.

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