Webb Telescope Just Saw More Galaxies in a Snapshot Than Hubble's Deepest Look
upstart writes:
And scientists have only seen four percent of the data so far:
A project to map the earliest structures of the universe has found 15,000 more galaxies in its first snapshot than captured in an entire deep field survey conducted 20 years ago.
The James Webb Space Telescope, the new preeminent observatory in the sky, saw about 25,000 galaxies in that single image, dramatically surpassing the nearly 10,000 shown in the Hubble Space Telescope's Ultra Deep Field Survey. Scientists say that little piece of the space pie represents just four percent of the data they'll discover from the new Webb survey by the time it's completed next year.
"When it is finished, this deep field will be astoundingly large and overwhelmingly beautiful," said Caitlin Casey, a University of Texas at Austin astronomer co-leading the investigation, in a statement.
[...] A deep field image is much like drilling deep into Earth to take a core sample: It's a narrow but distant view of the cosmos, revealing layers of history by cutting across billions of light-years. In Hubble's deep field, the oldest visible galaxies dated back to the first 800 million years after the Big Bang. That's an incredibly early period relative to the universe's estimated age of 13.8 billion-with-a-B years.
[...] Four different types of galaxies observed through the COSMOS-Web deep field survey.The COSMOS-Web survey will map 0.6 square degrees of the sky-about the area of three full moons.
The first images from COSMOS-Web, the largest program in Webb's first year, show a rich variety of structures, teeming with spiral galaxies, gravitational lensing, and galaxy mergers. Furthermore, hundreds of galaxies that were previously identified by Hubble are getting reclassified with different characteristics after being shown in more detail with Webb.
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