James Webb Telescope Pandora's Cluster NIRCam Image

Astronomers have just revealed the latest deep field image from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope. The telescope captured never-before-seen details in a region of space known as Pandora’s Cluster, and it’s mind-boggling!

The view displays three massive clusters of galaxies coming together to form a megacluster. But that’s not all! The combined mass of the galaxy clusters creates a powerful gravitational lens, which acts like a magnifying glass and allows us to observe much more distant galaxies in the early universe.

What’s even cooler is that the UNCOVER team used Webb’s Near-Infrared Camera to capture the cluster with exposures lasting 4-6 hours, for a total of about 30 hours of observing time. And the result? A panoramic image displaying roughly 50,000 sources of near-infrared light.

The galaxy cluster “lens” is so massive that it warps the fabric of space itself, which distorts the appearance of distant galaxies. Ivo Labbe, an astronomer from the Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, Australia, said that Webb revealed hundreds of distant lensed galaxies that appear like faint arced lines in the image.

Now, the UNCOVER team will meticulously go through the imaging data and select galaxies for follow-up observation, which will provide new insights into the early era of galaxy assembly and evolution. And if that’s not enough, all of the NIRCam photometric data has been publicly released so that other astronomers can become familiar with it and plan their own scientific studies with Webb’s rich datasets.

Image Credits

In-Article Image Credits

James Webb Telescope Pandora's Cluster NIRCam Image via James Webb Space Telescope with usage type - Public Domain. SCIENCE: NASA, ESA, CSA, Ivo Labbe (Swinburne), Rachel Bezanson (University of Pittsburgh) IMAGE PROCESSING: Alyssa Pagan (STScI)