The first deep-field observations of the James Webb Telescope provide sharper, more detailed images of thousands of distant galaxies.
Nationalgeographic.co.id—NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has so far delivered the deepest and sharpest infrared images of the distant universe. Webb’s First Deep Field is the galaxy cluster SMACS 0723, and it is teeming with thousands of other galaxies – including the faintest objects ever observed in the infrared.
Thanks to this first image of galaxy clusters from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), researchers can study the structures of extremely dense star clusters inside distant galaxies. Such dense star clusters are known as ‘star clumps’. This is the first time research has been done from observations of stellar clumps.
The results of this research were published January 5, 2023 in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society dengan makalah yang berjudul “Star formation at the smallest scales; A JWST study of the clump populations in SMACS0723.”
Researchers from Stockholm University have studied the first phase of star formation in this distant galaxy.
“The galaxy clusters we study are so massive that they deflect light rays passing through their center, as predicted by Einstein in 1915. And this in turn produces a kind of magnifying glass effect: a magnified image of the background galaxy,” explains Adélaïde Claeyssens, Department of Astronomy, University Stockholm, one of the study’s lead authors.
The magnifying glass effect along with the resolution of the James Webb Space Telescope allowed researchers to detect stellar clumps, the very dense structures of galaxies.
These observations allowed researchers to study the relationship between clump formation and the evolution and growth of galaxies several million years after the Big Bang. And that in a way that was not possible before.
The James Webb Space Telescope captured this image of this galaxy cluster (SMACS0723). The five magnified galaxies are so far away that we observe them as they did when the Universe was between one and five billion years old. The universe is currently 13.7 billion years old.
“These images from the James Webb Space Telescope show that we can now detect very small structures in very distant galaxies and we can see these blobs in many galaxies like this one,” said Angela Adamo, Oscar Klein Center, Stockholm University. , who is also one of the lead authors of the study.
“The telescope is a game changer for the entire field of research and helps us understand how galaxies form and evolve,” he added.
The galaxy cluster SMACS0723 was one of the first targets imaged by NASA’s James Webb. This large cluster is located in the southern constellation Volans (Flying Fish), at a distance of 4.24 billion light years.
The oldest galaxy studied in this paper is so far away that we can see what it looked like 13 billion years ago, when the universe was only 680 million years old.
