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James Webb Space Telescope Unveils Exquisite Views of Distant Galaxies

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Published on: January 3, 2023,

For decades the Hubble Telescope and ground based telescope have provided us with spectacular images of galaxies. After the launch of James Webb Telescope in December 2021 which completed commissioning during the first half of 2022 this all has changed. For astronomers the pictures has revealed a new way of imaging the galaxies with its telescope’s Near Infrared Camera ( NIRCam) instrument.

 

The NIRCam is Webb’s primary imager that covers the infrared wavelength range from 0.6 to 5 microns. The camera detects light from earliest stars and galaxies in the process of formation. For researchers the PEARLS program’s images show earliest galaxies show the amount of gravitational lensing of objects in the background of massive clusters of galaxies allowing the team to see some of these very distant objects. The team has worked with stunning multicolor images to identify interacting galaxies with active nuclei.

 

Windhorst and his team show evidence of giant black holes in their center where you can find accretion disc- the stuff falls into the black hole shines very brightly in the galaxy center. Windhorst said, “Webb’s images are truly phenomenal which is really beyond my wildest dreams.” The first thing the team can see in these in new images is that many galaxies that were next to or truly invisible to Hubble are bright in the images taken by Webb.

 

The first observations consists of two overlapping tiles produced an image that sows objects as faint as the brightness of 10 firefllies at the distance of two moon. The ultimate limit for Webb is one or two fireflies. The faintest reddest objects visible in the image are distant galaxies that go back to the first few hundred million years after Big Bang. The JWST images far exceed what we expected from my simulator prior to the first science observations. The images were surprising by their exquisite resolution.

 

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