NASA's Webb telescope unveils stunning galaxy clusters with never-before-seen details

NASA has dropped anor enthralling picture taken using James Webb Space Telescope. This new ‘deep field’ image is a composite of four photographs featuring three separate galaxy clusters which toger form a mega cluster. According to NASA, Webb's extremely sensitive infrared vision has helped uncover never-before-seen details of Pandora Cluster (Abell 2744), region of space which was previously studied by Hubble Space Telescope but not in such detail.

With powers of Webb and Hubble now combined, NASA says that this picture will 'open up a new frontier in study of cosmology and galaxy evolution'. 

It is worth noting, that Webb is designed to scan a tiny patch of sky in infrared wavelength, one which unlike visible light cannot be seen through human eyes but can be felt as heat. What's also worth mentioning is that Webb is able to photograph galaxies billions of years old because light that once left those galaxies got stretched from visible light to infrared after travelling vast distances, and Webb is designed to capture those stretched wavelengths of light.  

One interesting detail NASA pointed out is warped view Webb was able to capture, which is result of bigger foreground galaxies warping space around m. It makes light emerging from background galaxies bend. This is something that physicist Albert Einstein h predicted in his ory of Relativity. warping of light actually works in favour of astronomers as galaxies in back get magnified because galaxies in front act as a natural lens, which is why this phenomenon is called 'gravitational lensing'.

Astronomers welcome 'new era of astronomy'

Pandora Cluster was studied under “Ultreep NIRSpec and NIRCam ObserVations before Epoch of Reionization” (UNCOVER) program. UNCOVER team was able to photograph this region through Webb telescope's Near-infrared camera (NIRCam) which observed cluster for a total observational time of 30 hours, with each exposure lasting 4-6 hours. 

“Pandora’s Cluster, as imaged by Webb, shows us a stronger, wider, deeper, better lens than we have ever seen before," Astronomer Ivo Labbe of Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne said in an official statement. "We h to remind ourselves that this was real data, and we are working in a new era of astronomy now.”

As next step, team will carry out follow-up observation with Webb's Near-Infrared Spectrograph (NIRSpec) instrument, to make precise distance measurements, along with or detailed information about lensed galaxies’ compositions, and thus gain new insights into early galaxy assembly and evolution.