Two of probably the most highly effective house telescopes in the universe have joined forces to showcase a panorama of colourful galaxy clusters about 4.3 billion light-years away from Earth. The image of galaxy cluster MACS0416 is from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) and the Hubble Space Telescope and combines each seen and infrared gentle.
[Related: Euclid telescope spies shimmering stars and galaxies in its first look at the ‘dark’ universe.]
According to NASA, MACS0416 is a pair of colliding galaxy clusters that may finally mix to kind a good larger cluster. It contains quite a few galaxies outdoors of the cluster and another gentle sources that change over time. The variation is probably going because of a phenomenon known as gravitational lensing, the place gentle is distorted and amplified from distant background sources.
Color coding
In the image, totally different colours symbolize the various wavelengths of sunshine. The shortest are blue, the intermediate are inexperienced, and the longest are purple. The wavelengths vary from 0.4 to five microns and the variation creates a very vivid panorama of galaxies.
The colours additionally give clues to how far-off the galaxies are. The bluest galaxies are comparatively shut, have a tendency to indicate intense star formation, and are greatest detected by Hubble. The extra purple galaxies are typically additional away and are greatest noticed by JWST. Some of the galaxies additionally seem very purple as a result of they’ve a considerable amount of cosmic mud that tends to soak up bluer colours of starlight.
“The whole picture doesn’t become clear until you combine Webb data with Hubble data,” Rogier Windhorst mentioned in a press release. Windhorst is an astronomer at Arizona State University and principal investigator of the PEARLS program (Prime Extragalactic Areas for Reionization and Lensing Science), which took the JWST observations.
Oh Christmas tree
While the pictures are nice to appear like, they have been additionally taken for a particular scientific goal. The group was utilizing their knowledge to seek for objects various in noticed brightness over time, often known as transients. All of those colours twinkling collectively in the galaxy appear like shining colourful lights on a Christmas tree.
“We’re calling MACS0416 the Christmas Tree Galaxy Cluster, both because it’s so colorful and because of these flickering lights we find within it. We can see transients everywhere,” mentioned astronomer Haojing Yan of the University of Missouri in Columbia mentioned in a press release. Yan is a co-author of 1 paper describing the scientific outcomes revealed in The Astrophysical Journal.
The group recognized 14 transients throughout the sector of view. Twelve of the transients have been positioned in three galaxies which can be extremely magnified by gravitational lensing. This implies that they’re more likely to be particular person stars or multiple-star techniques which can be very extremely magnified for a brief time period. The different two transients are positioned inside extra reasonably magnified background galaxies, so they’re more likely to be supernovae.
More observations with JWST may result in discovering quite a few further transients and in different related galaxy clusters.
Godzilla and Mothra
One of the transients stood out in specific. The star system is positioned in a galaxy that existed roughly three billion years after the large bang and is magnified by an element of no less than 4,000. They nicknamed the star system Mothra in a nod to its “monster nature” of being each very vivid and magnified. Mothra joins one other lensed star the researchers beforehand recognized that they nicknamed “Godzilla.” In Japanese cinema, Godzilla and Mothra are big monsters often known as kaiju.
In addition to the new JWST photographs, Mothra can also be seen in the Hubble observations that have been taken 9 years in the past. According to the group, that is uncommon, as a result of a really particular alignment between the foreground galaxy cluster and the background star is required to enlarge a star this a lot. The alignment ought to have been eradicated by the mutual motions of the star and the cluster.
An further object throughout the foreground cluster might be including extra magnification.
“The most likely explanation is a globular star cluster that’s too faint for Webb to see directly,” astronomer Jose Diego of the Instituto de Física de Cantabria in Spain mentioned in a press release. “But we don’t know the true nature of this additional lens yet.” Diego can also be a co-author of a paper revealed in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics that particulars this discovering.