In an important step towards open science, an international team of researchers has launched the largest and most detailed map of the universe.
Photo: M. Franco / C. Casey / Cosmos-Web Collaboration
The project, called Cosmos-Web, brings together almost the entire history of the cosmos in a single extensive set of data. Created using information collected by the James Webb space telescope (JWST), the new map includes images and an impressive catalog with almost 800,000 galaxies.
The researchers behind this effort come from UC Santa Barbara and Rochester Institute of Technology, and have made a cosmic panorama that questions old ideas about the formation of early galaxies, according to Mediafax.
“Our goal was to build this deep field of space on a much larger physical scale than everything that has been done so far.”said Professor Caitlin Casey, a co-ordinator of the Cosmos-Web collaboration, along with Jeyhan Kartaltepe from the Rochester Institute of Technology.
Casey compares the image obtained with the famous “Hubble Ultra Deep Field”:
“If that field was on a regular sheet of paper, our image would be a mural of almost 4 meters on 4 meters, at the same depth. It is impressive.”
This image captures the universe as it looked about 13.5 billion years ago, which means it covers about 98% of the known cosmic history (given that the age of the universe is estimated at 13.8 billion years).
“We wanted to know where these galaxies lived”
The objective of the researchers was not only to identify distant galaxies, but also to understand the environment in which they appeared.
“The cosmos is organized in dense regions and vast gaps,” “ explains Casey. “We wanted more than to find the most distant galaxies-we wanted the wider context: where they lived.”
Before JWST begins observations, astronomers, using older tools such as Hubble telescope, believed that galaxies formed within the first 500 million years after the Big Bang were extremely rare.
“It makes sense – after the Big Bang it takes time for the matter to gather gravitational, to form the stars,” ” Casey said. “But the big surprise is that JWST shows us 10 times more galaxies than we would have expected at these incredible distances. We also see supermasive black holes that were not even visible with Hubble, and we do not see only more galaxies, ” she adds, “We see complete types of new galaxies and black holes. ”
Many unanswered questions
Although these data provide one of the most detailed looks at the early universe, they do not solve all strangers. On the contrary – he raises even more questions.
“Since the telescope was activated, we wonder: I destroy this data the current cosmological model?”“The universe produced too much light too early – it was only 400 million years old to form a star mass equivalent to one billion suns.“
“We just don’t know how this could have happened. We have many details to decipher And even more unanswered questions, ”” Casey concluded.
