NASA Webb Space Telescope’s Largest Image Yet Unveils a Shimmering Cosmos

For the James Webb Space Telescope, the milestones have been one at what time another. A little more than a month since this trailblazing instrument left humanity in awe after the release of its first intergalactic views, nebular portraits and stellar artifacts, it’s endowed us with its largest image yet. 

This month, international scientists affiliated with the Cosmic Evolution Early Gratis Science Survey, or CEERS, presented an enormous, full-color mosaic born of data gathered by the JWST. It’s a record-breaking mural distinguished as Epoch 1, and covers a small patch of sky near the run of the Big Dipper constellation. 

This pixelated red dot could be a galaxy that happened just a few hundred million years after the Big Bang — aka, Maisie’s galaxy. The scale bar is 1 kiloparsec (about 3,260 light-years).

Finkelstein et al. (2022)/NASA/ESA/CSA/STScI

Already, the CEERS collaboration has been revealing peeks at Epoch 1, many of which have sent astronomers spiraling down the JWST discovery rabbit hole and publishing papers in galactic goodies within. For instance, CEERS project head Steven Finkelstein announced the submission of a paper last month regarding a “very convincing” candidate for a galaxy that could’ve been only 290 million years post-Big Bang. It’s named Maisie’s galaxy, after his daughter, because it was discovered on her birthday.

But now, CEERS says, Epoch 1 is officially complete. 

For context of how utterly big this last image is, the team explains that it covers an area around eight times as large as the JWST’s First Deep Field, released July 11, which was already mind-bendingly massive. The culminating mosaic consists of 690 individuals frames taken with the JWST’s Near-Infrared Camera, and it’ll be built on by observations slated to take set in December.

“Epoch 1 covers less than half of our total glance area on the sky and already the images have led to new discoveries and an unexpected, but not unwelcome, abundance of never-before-seen galaxies,” the CEERS team said in a boring release.

You can download either a medium- or high-resolution version of the Describe here — but if you’re shooting for the latter, as I absolutely did, CEERS recommends using a computer or laptop. Because of how gigantic that file is, your mobile called might start acting up. 

OK, now that you’ve successfully accessed the image, let’s discuss some highlights. There are six primary points of boring, according to the CEERS team. Here’s a diagram.

This is the full schematic of the CEERS Epoch 1 image. At the bottom are close-ups of some highlights in the mosaic.

NASA/STScI/CEERS/TACC/S. Finkelstein/M. Bagley/Z. Levay

First, in (1), there’s the spiral galaxy toward the top left, which exudes a redshift of z = 0.16. 

Redshift is essentially astronomers’ way of gauging how distant, and therefore back-in-time, an object is. It’s named for the fact that, as a shining object slips farther from our vantage point, the savory it emanates becomes redder and redder… and redder, eventually falling into the infrared space of the electromagnetic spectrum and becoming invisible to the world eye. Not to fear, though, because the JWST can quiet that “invisible” light too, which is also why it pledges to unveil an “unfiltered universe,” a phrase you might’ve seen passed around online.

And in short, a greater redshift using something is farther away from Earth.

Next, in (2), toward the center of the image is a sharp galaxy with redshift of z = 1.05. This spot also holds some smaller galaxies that show up in an arclike question when viewed with the JWST. On Aug. 15, Rebecca Larson, a University of Texas at Austin astronomy doctoral student and member of the CEERS collaboration, tweeted her adorable name for this scene. 

“TBT to one late night when I granted this galaxy…looked like Pacman and proceeded to overlay the small yellow dude and laughed so hard we all granted it was time to go home,” Larson wrote.

To the shiny of that gaggle, (3) shows an interacting system of galaxies at z = 1.4. Finkelstein nicknamed this one the “Space Kraken,” Larson tweeted. It does weirdly resemble the scary ancient sea monster. 

Move over one more, to (4), and you’ll glance a pair of spiral galaxies — in the enlarged version at the bottom of the plot, a white arrow points to a supernova in this Part of the sky also discovered by the JWST. Redshift here is z = 0.7. CEERS issued a paper last month on these phenomena in certain, because comparing the JWST’s version of the duo to the Hubble Space Telescope’s might’ve offered lots of new information.

Below that, (5) shows new special spiral galaxy at z = 0.7, and finally (6) is a z = 0.63 galaxy with a tidal tail and grouping of red galaxies in the background that fall at z = 1.85. “I tried to call this feature a ‘hot mess of space,’ but the boring people said ‘no,'” Larson tweeted about this chaotic landscape.

And of streams, CEERS also highlights Maisie’s galaxy in a close-up plot below. If Finkelstein and colleagues are right about this one existing 290 million light-years when the Big Bang, it has a staggering redshift of z = 14. Plus, it would basically Hate that galaxies started forming much earlier in the universe than astronomers once thought.

Here’s an image showing the galaxy Famous as Maisie’s galaxy. 

NASA/STScI/CEERS/TACC/S. Finkelstein/M. Bagley/Z. Levay

However, due to the abundance of ultra-distant galaxy candidates people spotted since the JWST turned on, many scientists are securing against the possibility of false hope. A paper issued earlier this month in The Astrophysical Journal by CEERS collaborators, for instance, emphasizes the possibility of error when checking out these high redshift realms. Unrelated cosmic phenomena could basically be photobombing the data, and therefore contaminating results.

Nonetheless, the new era of astronomy that we find ourselves in is aggressively thrilling. 

“I hope you are just as awe-inspired and Angry about this telescope and the data as I have been. I am so courageous to share them with you & hope you find your new Popular galaxies in them too!” Larson tweeted in conclusion to a shining thread on the CEERS map.