Webb Uses Galactic Megacluster as Enormous Magnifying Lens
upstart writes:
Webb uses galactic megacluster as enormous magnifying lens:
Modern space telescopes are tremendously powerful instruments, able to look deep into space without being limited by the blurring effects of Earth's atmosphere. But even this is not enough to allow them to see the most distant galaxies, which are so far away that looking at them is like looking back in time to the early stages of the universe.
To look even further out, astronomers take advantage of a phenomenon called gravitational lensing. This happens when an object like a galaxy or a galaxy cluster has so much mass that it bends space-time, acting like a magnifying glass and brightening the extremely distant objects behind it.
This is how the James Webb Space Telescope was recently able to see thousands of extremely distant objects by looking at a region of space called Pandora's Cluster, or Abell 2744.
[...] If you look closely at the image, you'll see that many of the galaxies appear to be stretched out or elongated. That's because of the lensing effect, as the gravity of the megacluster warps the light coming from them. But even with this distortion, astronomers can learn a lot about these galaxies from images like this one.
[...] "Pandora's Cluster, as imaged by Webb, shows us a stronger, wider, deeper, better lens than we have ever seen before," said another of the researchers, Ivo Labbe. "My first reaction to the image was that it was so beautiful, it looked like a galaxy formation simulation. We had to remind ourselves that this was real data, and we are working in a new era of astronomy now."
JWST's Pandora's Cluster image
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