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The night sky has been transformed into a cosmic crowd shotwell by a single photograph—10,000 of them, in fact.Together with the seasoned Hubble, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has produced an infrared landscape so full of light that accounting of the galaxies is like counting grains of sand. However, the true star is not the number, as amazing as it is, but rather a dazzling web of galaxies that seem to be tying themselves into one of the great urban centers of the cosmos.
The numbers that set records
The mosaic, known as the COSMOS-Web field, was stitched from more than 10,000 JWST observations and spans 0.54 square degrees, or two-and-a-half full moons. Approximately 800,000 unique galaxies and 1,678 distinct galaxy groupings have already been tagged by computer vision technologies, making this the richest harvest ever released in a single study.
Webb spots a golden-white cluster near the lower center of the frame, whose starlight started its trip 6.5 billion years after the Big Bang, when the universe was just about half as old as it is now.
Intergalactic Tetris was used to create the image. In order to fill in detector gaps, Webb’s Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam) hopped across the sky in 12 by 9 tiles, each slightly offset. 40 gigabytes of raw data were coaxed through pipelines by the COSMOS-Web consortium back on Earth. These pipelines clean cosmic rays, align star fields to milliarcsecond accuracy, and balance color so that brighter stars lean turquoise and cooler ones blaze ruby.
Lastly, engineers added short-wavelength information that Webb is unable to perceive by overlaying Hubble’s optical data. The end effect is a canvas the size of a wall, with foreground spirals less than 50 million light-years away and galaxies 500 million years after the Big Bang in the same frame.
A city forming in deep time
The cluster of galaxies in that striking, gold-tinted knot is several hundred trillion Suns in weight. While Webb resolves individual component galaxies dancing like fireflies around a porch lamp, ESA’s XMM-Newton reveals X-ray patterns of hot gas trapped in the cluster’s gravitational pull. More than half of all galaxies in the universe today reside in clusters like this one, making them cosmic laboratories. Astronomers can reconstruct the dark-matter framework that constructed the modern universe by studying the speed at which this cluster came together.
Webb disputes the standard CDM simulations’ prediction of a sparse early universe. The scan discovers almost 10 times as many low-mass galaxies in the first 2 billion years than models predict.
Some scientists contend that galaxies with dustier star-forming areas appear brighter; others believe that changes to dark-matter physics or the processes that turn gas into stars may be necessary. In any case, the discrepancy is a scientist’s dream problem because it forces new theories rather than validating preexisting ones.
Life behind the pixels
Anya Malik, a graduate programmer, called her alignment script mosaic-tetris. Her Slack ping appeared at 02:57 a.m. on an April morning: Tile 432 matched, RMS error 0.004. Luis Robles, a teammate in Santiago, Chile, responded with a pyrotechnics GIF. The couple examined thousands of residual plots over the course of eight weeks, with each cluster of green dots representing a small win over misplaced starlight. “We zoomed in and got lost when the final composite loaded,” Malik adds. There was a new galaxy rabbit hole with each click.
The brightest members of the cluster will now be dissected by Webb’s spectrographs, which will read chemical barcodes that indicate the star-forging date. In order to capture supernovae and black-hole flares among the galaxies that Webb exposes, the Vera Rubin Observatory, which is scheduled to begin its ten-year film of the southern sky in 2026, will overlay time-domain data on top of Webb’s deep still-life.
In the future, ESA’s Athena X-ray telescope may be able to test alternative gravity theories by mapping the flow of hot gas across the cluster’s dark-matter halo.
Galaxy clusters serve as cosmic history markers, dark matter magnets, and natural particle accelerators. The cosmic distance ladder that GPS satellites and climate models indirectly rely on can be improved by knowing how they come together.
The open-access Additionally, COSMOS-Web viewer makes the public collaborators: high school students can identify strange arcs that could be powerful gravitational lenses, and citizen scientists can co-author peer-reviewed papers with just a web browser.
