The James Webb Space Telescope’s stunning infrared image of the universe has revealed 42 new images of lensed galaxies, revealing an unprecedented depth of lens shape that could eventually help us see the first galaxies.
revelation of James Webb Space Telescope Deep image of US President Joe Biden in a special presentation White House event Who was arrested on July 11 was a closely guarded secret. Teams of astronomers raced to be the first to analyze it, with three new research papers posted to the community’s prepress server a week after the image was released.
“We were kind of upset, to be honest!” Brenda Fry, an astronomer at the University of Arizona’s Steward Observatory and co-author of one of the papers, told Space.com. “We usually have a year or two notice, but no one has seen it. [this release] Arriving at this time.”
Gallery: The first images from the James Webb Space Telescope
Related: How does the James Webb Space Telescope work?
o galaxy The cluster SMACS J0723.3-7327, known as SMACS J0723, is among a group of galaxy clusters imaged by Webb for various gravitational lensing surveys. Also, said Frye, there has been nothing outstanding about SMACS J0723 – until now.
beautifully chosen [to be one of the first images] Because it was a relatively unknown target.”
gravity lens A phenomenon in which the gravity of a very massive object causes space to bend into a shape similar to an optical lens, distorting light from what is behind the lens and amplifying it into brightness. Galactic clusters are particularly effective lenses because they contain an enormous amount of mass (in the case of SMACS J0723, about 100 trillion times the mass of the Sun) in a relatively compact volume with a diameter of about 3 to 5 million light years. in diameter. .
Previous research carried out by Hubble Space Telescope is retired Herschel Space Observatory They found some lenticular images of background galaxies in their observation SMACS J0723. But Webb is taking research to a whole new level.
The Frye team, led by graduate student Massimo Pascal at the University of California, Berkeley, discovered 42 new lens images in the background of the new deep-field image. Gravitational lensing can create multiple images of the same galaxy, so these 42 images represent 19 individual galaxies. Another team led by Gabriel Caminha of the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics in Germany counted 27 images with a new lens.
Whatever the end result, these lenticular images allow scientists to fine-tune the map of how matter is visible and visible. Dingy – Distributed in the SMACS J0723 series, thus designing the lens shape. One of the new papers, from a team led by Guillaume Mahler of the University of Durham, concludes that most of the mass is concentrated in the brightest and most massive galaxy in the cluster.
“Our models not only describe the mass, but we can also use them to describe the magnification of these lenticular images,” Pascal told Space.com.
Currently the most distant confirmed galaxy is a distant object known as GN-z11which has a redshift of 11.09, which means we see it as it was 13.4 billion years ago, that is, just 400 million years later the big explosion. (“Redshift” refers to the stretching of the wavelength of light that occurs when the universe is stretched between a distant object and the observer. The higher the redshift factor, the farther the light source.)
The farthest candidate is HD1, which was detected at a redshift of 13, appears to us as it did just 300 million years after the Big Bang. and recently, Initial web results It identified another redshift 13 candidate galaxy, called GLASS-z11. However, astronomers have not confirmed the redshift of HD1 or GLASS-z11.
Webb is expected to break both of these redshift records, although which of the lensed galaxies seen in SMACS J0723 are beyond Gn-z11 or HD1 has yet to be identified. Pascal and Frey are interested in mapping a phenomenon called the “critical curve”, as it is along these curves that a gravitational lens applies the greatest magnification force, and where astronomers are most likely to see the first galaxies.
“Typical magnification in the lens cluster is about 10 times, which is not enough to see the first galaxies,” Frey said. “But if we look close to the critical curve, that’s where things get magnified hundreds or even thousands of times.”
Think of a critical curve as contour lines on a topographical map of a surface. a land. The more these contour lines are grouped, the higher any point on the surface will rise. Likewise, the critical curve is where the contour lines of gravitational potentials converge, and the more of them there are, the greater the strength of that potential and the corresponding magnification. The location and shape of images with a lens can give an indication of where the critical curve is.
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“Ultimately, what we want to do is look directly along the critical curve, where the magnification is greatest, and that’s where we’re going to find the galaxies with the greatest redshift,” Frey said.
It is for this reason that Webb’s initial trio of new deep-field papers focus on modeling the amount and distribution of matter in the anterior mass, and therefore the shape of the lens and the location of the critical curve.
However, modeling can also tell us about the history of the galaxy cluster.
“We found that the overall distribution is a little longer than expected,” Pascal said. “Maybe that says something about Cluster merger historyand we can extrapolate that and learn something about the formation of the block as a whole, which takes place in a very chaotic environment where gravity From all these galaxies, pull each other.”
The immediate next step for Pascal, Frey’s team and the other two authors of the papers is to follow the peer review process to see these findings published in scientific journals. In addition, data from NIRISS (Near Infrared Imager and Slit Spectrometer) are waiting to be analyzed and should help scientists determine the spectral redshift of lenticular galaxies and see how far away they are. (The deep-field image was captured by NIRCam, the near-infrared camera.)
“Before Webb filmed it, SMACS J0723 wasn’t the star of the show,” said Pascal. “Now, all of a sudden, there’s paper after paper about it that really speaks to how powerful the Webb Web is, to reveal things that we couldn’t see before.”
The initial version of the Pascal and Free document can be found this way. The other two cards are available this way It’s at this way.
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