Hi all :)
I've been a little inactiv lately but I'm trying to post more content in the near future. Today I wanted to talk about astronomy, something I haven't really done on this blog so far, although it is something I'm really interested in.
Yesterday, I tried to see the supermoon but the clouds above the place where I live were so bad, I could only catch an few glimpses. And no photos I'm afraid :(
However, NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has produced a much better picture than I ever could. This one isn't about the supermoon, it shows the galaxy cluster SMACS 0723 (astronomical objects all have so romantic names, don't they?) which can be seen from the southern hemisphere and lies in the direction of the constellation Volans. Other clusters "in front of" and "behind" the cluster are also captured in the picture.
SMACS 0723 is 4.6 billion lightyears from earth. This means that the light which is reaching us right now was emitted roughly at the same time the earth was "born". Or in other words: the galaxies you can see on the picture; that's what they looked like 4.6 billion years ago... When life began on earth, this ligth still had have the way to go... That's amazing!
But if you are impressed by age and distance, it still gets better: as you can see when you look closely at the image, certain objects seem to be "curved" as if seen through a lens. This is because the gravity of SMACS 0723 is so large, that it works as a gravitational lens, which allows us to see objects so far away, we wouldn't normally be able to see them. Thus the picture also shows galaxies from a time when the universe was less than a billion years old, which must be roughly 13 billion lightyears away. So far, the most distant galaxy on the image has been located at 13.1 billion lightyears away, but who knows if scientist can identify one that is even further away. It is the most detailed view of the early universe to date.
Now to the picture itself: according to NASA, the image is "the size of a grain of sand held at arm’s length, a tiny sliver of the vast universe." Such as small piece of sky (as it would appear to a human standing on earth's surface looking up) can contain so many galaxies, each with millions or billions of suns. Just think about it. The number of potential planets and potential lifeforms on said planets, must be gigantic!
James Webb Space Telescope took a mulitude of images at different wavelenghts, which have been combined to create the image you see. Right now, scientist are going through the data to learn as much as possible about SMACS 0723.
I'm very exited about what the are going to find, as you surely are too. Let me know what you think about this amazing image.
By the was, did I even mention it was the deepest infrared image of the universe so far?
For more information on the Webb Telescope, visit: https://webbtelescope.org/