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

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

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

It’s a great big universe…

Webb’s new view of Pandora’s Cluster stitches 4 snapshots together into a panorama, showing 3 separate galaxy clusters merging into a megacluster and some 50,000 sources of near-infrared light. https://t.co/WOYTvm6pSa pic.twitter.com/0dLHKLMe6h

— NASA Webb Telescope (@NASAWebb) February 15, 2023

It is worth noting, that Webb is designed to scan a tiny patch of the sky in infrared wavelength, the 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 the 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.  

Only the center core of Pandora’s Cluster (or Abell 2744) has been previously studied in detail by @NASAHubble. Webb’s powerful view fills in the gaps, providing astronomers a much broader and deeper look at this region. pic.twitter.com/klbM7fTQqY

— NASA Webb Telescope (@NASAWebb) February 15, 2023

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

Astronomers welcome 'new era of astronomy'

The Pandora Cluster was studied under the “Ultradeep NIRSpec and NIRCam ObserVations before the Epoch of Reionization” (UNCOVER) program. The UNCOVER team was able to photograph this region through the Webb telescope's Near-infrared camera (NIRCam) which observed the 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 the Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne said in an official statement. "We had to remind ourselves that this was real data, and we are working in a new era of astronomy now.”

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