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Megacluster of galaxies reveals its secrets in new Webb telescope image

Updated on: February 16, 2023 / 5:57 AM EST / CBS/CNN

CBS News Baltimore

(CNN) -- The James Webb Space Telescope just peered into a celestial Pandora's box to see what lies beyond a megacluster of galaxies.

The space observatory observed Pandora's Cluster, also known as Abell 2744, where three massive clusters of galaxies are merging.

The group of galaxy clusters acts as a magnifying glass for the objects behind it. Called gravitational lensing, this natural phenomenon created a deep-field view that includes incredibly old and faint galaxies. Deep-field observations are long exposures of regions of the sky that can show distant, difficult-to-see objects.

Webb has already captured several deep-field views of the universe since it began scientific observations in July. Gravitational lensing is crucial for astronomers because it can uncover features of the early universe that are otherwise impossible to see.

The operations center for the telescope is in Baltimore City, at the Space Telescope Science Institute on the Johns Hopkins campus.

Previous images of the central core of Pandora's Cluster came courtesy of the Hubble Space Telescope. Webb's latest observation of the cluster has revealed never-before-seen details in infrared light, which is invisible to the human eye.

Astronomers estimate 50 000 sources of near-infrared light are represented in this image from the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope. Their light has travelled through various distances to reach the telescope's detectors, representing the vastness of space in a single image. A foreground star in our own galaxy, to the right of the image centre, displays Webb's distinctive diffraction spikes. Bright white sources surrounded by a hazy glow are the galaxies of Pandora's Cluster, a conglomeration of already-massive clusters of galaxies coming together to form a mega cluster. The concentration of mass is so great that the fabric of spacetime is warped by gravity, creating a natural, super-magnifying glass called a 'gravitational lens' that astronomers can use to see very distant sources of light beyond the cluster that would otherwise be undetectable, even to Webb. These lensed sources appear red in the image, and often as elongated arcs distorted by the gravitational lens. Many of these are galaxies from the early universe, with their contents magnified and stretched out for astronomers to study. Other red sources in the image have yet to be confirmed by follow-up observations with Webb's Near-Infrared Spectrograph (NIRSpec) instrument to determine their true nature. One intriguing example is an extremely compact source that appears as a tiny red dot, despite the magnifying effect of the gravitational lens. One possibility is that the dot is a supermassive black hole in the early universe. NIRSpec data will provide both distance measurements and compositional details of selected sources, providing a wealth of previously-inaccessible information about the universe and how it has evolved over time. [Image Description: A crowded galaxy field on a black background, with one large star dominating the image just right of center. Three areas are concentrated with larger white hazy blobs on the left, lower right, and upper right above the single star. Scattered bet Space Telescope Science Institut

Astronomers in the UNCOVER program, or Ultradeep NIRSpec and NIRCam ObserVations before the Epoch of Reionization, used Webb's unique Near-Infrared Camera for 30 hours to capture detailed long-exposure images. The latest photo released Wednesday stitches together four of those images into a panorama that includes 50,000 sources of near-infrared light.

Hundreds of faint arced lines in the lower-right image are actually distant galaxies that scientists weren't able to spot with Hubble.

The many dots of light in the new Webb image represent galaxies. Gravitational lensing can distort the appearance of distant galaxies, making them appear different from the galaxies in the foreground of the image - which is why the distant galaxies resemble arcs of light.

Next, the research team will go through all of the data in the image and pinpoint galaxies that they'd like to study further this summer to gain new insights into the early universe.

By Ashley Strickland, CNN