New Webb telescope photo truly boggles the mind

[Judi Lynn]

Ancient collisions.
By Mark Kaufman on May 22, 2024



A deep view of the universe teeming with galaxies. Credit: ESA / Webb / NASA / CSA / J. Dunlop / D. Magee / P. G. Pérez-González / H. Übler / R. Maiolino, et. al

Everywhere you look are galaxies.

The powerful James Webb Space Telescope recently captured a new deep field view of the universe, which is a look into some of the farthest reaches of space. In the image below, the hundreds of objects you can see (except for the six-pointed stars in the foreground) are galaxies among the black ether of the cosmos, each teeming with stars and planets. Many are spirals, like our Milky Way galaxy. The deepest ones appear red, as the expanding universe has stretched their light into longer wavelengths of red light.

This view, which looks back at galaxies billions of years ago — because it takes that long for such old light to reach us — reveals two galaxies and the black holes at their centers merging just some 740 million years after the Big Bang created our universe. The universe is now 13.7 billion years old.

Specialized instruments aboard the Webb telescope called spectrographs — which separate different types of light into different color spectrums, similar to a prism — revealed dense gases rapidly spinning in the galaxies, which helped identify the black holes. (Black holes, wielding extreme gravities, pull matter around them in blazing-hot disks of matter, called accretion disks.)

Astronomers have found that early black holes are extremely massive, which is unexpected because they're so young. But new evidence from Webb, like these new views, show the great mergers occurred long ago.

"Our findings suggest that merging is an important route through which black holes can rapidly grow, even at cosmic dawn," Hannah Übler, an astronomer at the University of Cambridge who led the research, said in a statement. "Together with other Webb findings of active, massive black holes in the distant Universe, our results also show that massive black holes have been shaping the evolution of galaxies from the very beginning."



Except for the six-pointed stars in the foreground, everything in this James Webb Space Telescope image is a galaxy. Credit: ESA / Webb / NASA / CSA / J. Dunlop / D. Magee / P. G. Pérez-González / H. Übler / R. Maiolino, et. al

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https://mashable.com/article/james-webb-space-telescope-galaxies-black-holes