In a breathtaking new vision of the universe, never-before-seen features of a region of space where three galaxies are merging have been revealed. The interesting image is the most recent deep field image captured by NASA's new James Webb Space Telescope.
MailOnline reported that it showcases Pandora's Cluster (Abell 2744), a location around 3.5 billion light-years away where multiple existing huge galaxies are merging to produce a megacluster so massive that its gravity bends space-time around it.
Astronomers estimate 50,000 sources of near-infrared light are represented in this image from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope. Their light has travelled through varying distances to reach the telescope’s detectors, representing the vastness of space in a single image.
New Image of Pandora's Cluster Works Like Magnifying Glass
Astronomer Rachel Bezanson of the University of Pittsburgh explained via NASA's press release that the ancient myth of Pandora is about human curiosity and discoveries that separate the past from the future. She believes that it fits the connection between the realms of the universe the Webb is opening up, like the deep-field image of Pandora's Cluster.
She added that they were starstruck upon seeing the photographs of Pandora's Cluster and felt lost in the image due to its superb detail in the foreground cluster that showed lensed galaxies. It proves that the space telescope has once outperformed expectations.
As per MailOnline, the image stitches four Webb snapshots combined in a panoramic image to display over 50,000 cosmic objects in near-infrared light. Researchers describe it as like a magnifying glass that uses the combined mass of galaxy clusters to create a powerful gravitational lens.
Through that method, they were able to observe a new frontier in the study of cosmology and the evolution of galaxies as it allowed them to see more distant galaxies in the early universe. It is affected by the so-called gravitational lensing that is caused by the influence of an object on the space-time around it and makes far-away galaxies look different from those in the foreground.
Huge cosmic objects, like galaxy clusters, twist and deform space-time to such an extent that light from these distant objects is deflected or distorted, resulting in strange patterns or peculiar optical illusions.
In the new Webb image, hundreds of distant lensed galaxies show faint arced lines to the bottom right. When one looks closely at the area, it reveals an increasing number of them.
READ ALSO: James Webb Space Telescope May Have Found the Oldest Galaxy Ever That Existed 13.5 Billion Years Ago
Theory of General Relativity Explains Pandora's Cluster
Pandora's Cluster is an assortment of different cosmic objects within it, but only the central core of this region has been studied previously by the Hubble Space Telescope. As per Space.com, this means that it still has secrets left undiscovered not until the JWST turned its powerful infrared instrument to the area.
Scientists captured the new image of Pandora's Cluster using the space telescope's Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam) and Near-Infrared Spectrograph (NIRSpec) instruments as part of the Ultradeep NIRSpec and NIRCam ObserVations. They were in awe of what they found as it revealed things previously unknown from the Hubble observations.
The theory of general relativity predicts that objects with mass could affect the fabric of space and warp it. The curvature it creates could be so extreme that the light's path is curved as it passes. That explains why the JWST image is now only showing other objects in Pandora's Cluster.
The new data is expected to be released this summer and should provide whole new insights into how galaxies formed in the early universe and developed to become the cosmos of today.
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