The stunning deep-infrared image of the universe captured by the James Webb Space Telescope has revealed 42 new images of lensing galaxies and revealed unprecedented depth to the lens shape, which could eventually help us see the first galaxies.
revelation of James Webb Space Telescope Deep image of US President Joe Biden in a special presentation White House event Who was arrested on July 11 was a closely guarded secret. Teams of astronomers raced to be the first to analyze it, with three new research papers posted to the community prepress server a week after the image was released.
“We were a little upset, to be honest!” Brenda Fry, an astronomer at the University of Arizona’s Steward Observatory and co-author of one of the papers, told Space.com. “We usually have a year or two notice, but no one has seen it. [this release] I arrive at this time.
Gallery: The first images from the James Webb Space Telescope
Related: How does the James Webb Space Telescope work?
O galaxy The SMACS J0723.3-7327 cluster, known as SMACS J0723, is one of a group of galaxy clusters imaged by Webb for various gravitational lensing studies. Also, Frey said, there was nothing exceptional about SMACS J0723 – until now.
beautifully chosen [to be one of the first images] Because it was a relatively unknown target.
gravity lens Phenomenon in which the gravity of a very massive object causes space to bend into a shape similar to an optical lens, distorting the light from what is behind the lens and magnifying it in brightness. Galactic clusters are particularly effective lenses because they contain enormous mass (in the case of SMACS J0723, about 100 trillion times the mass of the Sun) in a relatively compact volume with a diameter of about 3 to 5 million d light years. diameter. .
Previous research conducted by The Hubble Space Telescope is retired Herschel Space Observatory They found lenticular images of background galaxies in their SMACS J0723 observation. But Webb takes research to a whole new level.
The Frye team, led by graduate student Massimo Pascal of the University of California, Berkeley, discovered 42 new images of lenses in the background of the new deep-field image. Gravitational lensing can create multiple images of the same galaxy, so these 42 images represent 19 individual galaxies. Another team led by Gabriel Caminha of the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics in Germany counted 27 images with a new lens.
Whatever the end result, these lenticular images allow scientists to refine the map of how matter is seen and seen. Dark – Distributed in the SMACS J0723 series, thus designing the shape of the lens. One of the new papers, from a team led by Guillaume Mahler of Durham University, concludes that most of the mass is concentrated in the brightest and most massive galaxy in the cluster.
“Our models not only describe the mass, but we can also use them to describe the magnification of these lenticular images,” Pascal told Space.com.
Currently, the farthest confirmed galaxy is a distant object known as GN-z11which has a redshift of 11.09 meaning we see it as it was 13.4 billion years ago, i.e. just 400 million years later the big blast. (“Redshift” refers to the stretching of the wavelength of light that occurs when the universe is stretched between a distant object and the observer. The higher the redshift factor, the greater the light source is far away.)
The furthest candidate is HD1, which was detected at a redshift of 13, appears to us as it was barely 300 million years after the Big Bang. and recently, First web results He identified another candidate galaxy for redshift 13, called GLASS-z11. However, astronomers have not confirmed the redshift of HD1 or GLASS-z11.
Webb is expected to break both of these redshift records, although which of the lensed galaxies seen in SMACS J0723 is beyond Gn-z11 or HD1 has yet to be identified. Pascal and Frey are interested in mapping a phenomenon called the “critical curve”, because it is along these curves that the gravitational lens uses the greatest magnifying force, and where astronomers are most likely to see the first galaxies.
“Typical magnification in the lens cluster is about 10 times, which is not enough to see the first galaxies,” Frey said. “But if we look closely at the critical curve, that’s where things get magnified hundreds, if not thousands of times.”
Think of a critical curve as contour lines on a topographic map of a surface. a terrain. The more these contour lines are grouped together, the higher any point on the surface will rise. Likewise, the critical curve is where the contour lines of gravitational potentials converge, and the more there are, the greater the strength of that potential and the corresponding magnification. The location and shape of images with a lens can give an indication of where the critical curve is.
“Ultimately what we want to do is look straight along the critical curve, where the magnification is the greatest, and that’s where we’re going to find the galaxies with the greatest shift towards the red,” Frey said.
It is for this reason that Webb’s first trio of new deep-field papers focus on modeling the amount and distribution of matter in the anterior mass, and thus the shape of the lens and the location of the critical curve.
However, the modeling can also tell us about the history of the galaxy cluster.
“We found that the overall cast is a bit longer than expected,” Pascal said. “Maybe that says a lot about History of cluster mergersand we can extrapolate that and learn something about the composition of the block as a whole, which happens in a very chaotic environment where gravity Of all these galaxies, draw from each other.
The immediate next step for Pascal, Frey’s team and the other two authors of the papers is to go through the peer review process to see these results published in scientific journals. Additionally, data from the NIRISS (Near Infrared Imager and Slit Spectrophotometer) is waiting to be analyzed and should help scientists determine the spectral redshift of lenticular galaxies and see how far apart they are. (The deep-field image was captured by NIRCam, the near-infrared camera.)
“Before Webb filmed it, SMACS J0723 wasn’t the star of the show,” Pascal said. “Now suddenly there’s paper after paper, which really shows how powerful Webb Web is, in revealing things that we couldn’t see before.”
The initial version of the Pascal and Free document can be found This way. The other two cards are available This way And the This way.
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