Why was the first Webb telescope image so crooked, crooked, and weird

In the first image released by NASA from the Webb telescope, some galaxies look like stretched strings of candy.

That’s because the universe itself has changed our view of the deep cosmos.

Astronomers recently pointed the colossal James Webb Space Telescope at a group of galaxies dubbed SMACS 0723. Most importantly, galaxies are extremely massive objects because they contain hundreds of billions of stars, millions of black holes, and perhaps trillions of planets. The combined mass of these galaxies warps space, like a bowling ball sitting on a mattress.

This curved space essentially creates the “lens” we see. So the light from the galaxy behind the galaxy cluster that we (or the Webb telescope) see ends up being distorted. This is an event called “gravitational lensing.” As the Space Telescope Science Institute (which runs the telescope) explains: “It’s like having a camera lens between us and a galaxy more distant.”

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The first stunning cosmic image from the James Webb telescope is here

Albert Einstein predicted the gravitational lens effect more than a century ago. Some of the galaxies we can see below in Webb’s first deep look into the cosmos, then, are enlarged, and some are deeply stretched or distorted.

“They have been magnified by the gravity of the cluster, as Einstein said,” NASA astrophysicist Jane Rigby said in revealing Webb’s first scientific images.

NASA calls this image “Webb’s First Deep Field.” This is an image of the galaxy cluster “SMACS 0723.” Galactic mass distorts, and enlarges, more distant galaxies in the background
Credit: NASA/ESA/CSA/STScI

In the image above, the ethereal galaxy cluster that appears white is about 4.6 billion years old. They formed around the same time as the sun and Earth, Rigby said. It is this white galaxy that zooms in and changes the scene behind.

This more distant object, which includes a red dot and a strangely distorted galaxy, is one of the oldest objects in the universe. “All the tiny, very faint dark red dots, as well as the many lighter and oddly shaped objects in this stunning image are very distant galaxies that the human eye has never seen before,” Harald Ebeling, an astronomer at the University of Hawaii Institute of astronomy, said. said in a statement.

The faintest object in Webb’s image is about 13.1 billion years old, Rigby said. But Webb will soon look further into the past, more than 13.5 billion years agosoon after the first stars and galaxies formed.

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The Webb Telescope — a collaboration between NASA, the European Space Agency, and the Canadian Space Agency — was designed to make an unprecedented discovery. “With this telescope, it’s really hard not to break records,” Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA’s astrophysicist and associate administrator for the agency’s Science Mission Directorate, said at a recent press conference.

Here’s how Webb achieves unparalleled things:

• giant mirror: The Webb mirror, which captures light, is over 21 feet wide. It is more than two and a half times larger than the Hubble Space Telescope mirror. Capturing more light allowed Webb to see more distant ancient objects.

  “We’re going to see the first stars and galaxies that ever formed,” Jean Creighton, astronomer and director of the Manfred Olson Planetarium at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, told Mashable last year.

• Infrared display: Unlike Hubble, which sees mostly light visible to us, Webb is essentially an infrared telescope, meaning it sees light in the infrared spectrum. This allows us to see much more about the universe. Infrared has a longer wavelength than visible light, so light waves more efficiently penetrate cosmic clouds; light does not often collide and is scattered by these solid particles. Ultimately, Webb’s infrared vision could penetrate places Hubble couldn’t penetrate.

  “It lifted the veil,” Creighton said.

• Peek into distant exoplanets: Webb telescope carry special equipment, called a spectrometer, which will revolutionize our understanding of this distant world. The instrument can decipher what molecules (such as water, carbon dioxide and methane) are in the atmospheres of distant exoplanets — be they gas giants or smaller rocky worlds. Webb will see exoplanets in the Milky Way galaxy. Who knows what we will find.

  “We may learn things we never thought about,” Mercedes López-Morales, an exoplanet researcher and astrophysicist at the Center for Astrophysics-Harvard & Smithsonian, told Mashable in 2021.

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