Webb telescope detects a field of extragalactic pearls

The Webb Space Telescope captured one of the first mid-depth wide-field images of the cosmos, featuring a region of sky known as the Pole of the Ecliptic.

This region corresponds to the point on the celestial sphere where any imaginary line perpendicular to the ecliptic plane falls, the apparent path followed by the Sun on the celestial sphere throughout a yearseen from Earth, details Europe Press.

The image, which accompanies an article published in the Astronomical Journalis from the GTO Prime Extragalactic Areas for Reionization and Lensing Science (PEARLS) program.

“average depth” refers to the faintest objects that can be seen in the image, which are about magnitude 29 (a billion times fainter than what can be seen with the naked eye), while “wide field” refers to the total area that will be covered by the program, about one twelfth the area of ​​the full moon.

The image is made up of eight different colors of near-infrared light captured by Webb’s near-infrared camera (NIRCam), Magnified with three colors of visible and ultraviolet light from the Hubble Space Telescope.

The color image reveals in unprecedented detail and exquisite depth a universe teeming with galaxies to the furthest reaches, many of which have not previously been seen by Hubble or the largest ground-based telescopes, as well as a variety of stars. inside our own Milky Way.

The observations of NIRCam will be combined with spectra obtained from Webb’s Near Infrared Imager and Slitless Spectrograph (NIRISS), allowing the team to search for faint objects with spectral emission lines, which can be used to estimate their distances more accurately. .

“I was impressed with the first images of PEARLS,” Rolf Jansen, ASU research scientist and PEARLS co-investigator, said in a statement. “Little did I know, when I selected this field near the pole of the ecliptic, that it would produce such a trove of distant galaxies, and that we would obtain direct clues to the processes by which galaxies assemble and grow. I can see streams, tails, shells and halos of stars in their surroundings, the remains of their building blocks.” (YO)