(ORDO NEWS) — New NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope image shows never-before-seen details of the Pandora Cluster (Abell 2744). The image shows three clusters of galaxies coming together to form a supercluster.
The combined mass of galaxy clusters creates a powerful gravitational lens that makes it possible to observe much more distant galaxies in the early universe using the cluster as a magnifying glass.
Astronomers studied this region as part of the Ultradeep NIRSpec and NIRCam ObserVations before the Epoch of Reionization (UNCOVER) program.
The scientists combined four of the Webb’s images into one panoramic image, displaying approximately 50,000 near-infrared light sources.
In addition to zooming in, gravitational lensing distorts the appearance of distant galaxies so they don’t look the same as they do in the foreground.
The “lens” of a cluster of galaxies is so massive that it deforms the very fabric of space, causing light from distant galaxies to pass through this warped space as well.
Webb has found hundreds of distant galaxies with lenses that appear as faint arcing lines in the image.
The UNCOVER team used the NIRCam camera to capture the cluster. The next step is to carefully analyze the image data and select galaxies for follow-up with the NIRSpec near-infrared spectrograph.
The UNCOVER team expects to conduct NIRSpec observations in the summer of 2023. In the meantime, all NIRCam photometric data has been made public for other astronomers to review.
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