Since going online earlier this year, NASA James Webb Space Telescope has been making history whenever possible. It has examined far-off nebulae, followed dust veins in old galaxies, and viewed billions of years of cosmic history. And it’s only recently started running! Webb has only given us a glimpse of what it is capable of, if the most recent results from the Cosmic Evolution Early Release Science Survey (CEERS) provide any clue. This project recently made available Epoch 1, an amazing deep space mural. The full-resolution photos have more galaxies than you can fathom and are hundreds of megabytes in size.
Three of the main instruments on the Webb telescope—NIRCam, MIRI, and NIRSpec—will be used in the CEERS Survey to show, test, and evaluate extragalactic observational techniques. Epoch 1 and Epoch 2 are the names of the two sections that make up the project. The first portion of the new data release, which consists of four of the ten anticipated observational blocks, is now available. There are countless galaxies visible, despite the fact that these are from a very small area of sky close to the handle of the big dipper. Yes, even greater than the already incredible deep field image from Webb.
The final, full-color copies of the combined photos are available for download at CEERS, however you should be aware that their size varies depending on the annotations and ranges from 256 to 515 megabytes. You may zoom in and simply explore a sea of galaxies more than 30,000 pixels wide because they have such a great resolution. Only a small portion of Epoch 1 is seen in the graphic at the top of this article.
The CEERS team has located some of Epoch 1’s most intriguing objects in the image above.
Here are the salient features of each.
- A spiral galaxy at a redshift of z = 0.16. The resolution of the JWST imaging reveals a large number of blue star-forming clumps and star clusters.
- A chance alignment of a bright galaxy at a redshift z = 1.05 with several smaller galaxies forming an arc in the sky when viewed from JWST.
- An interacting system of galaxies at z = 1.4, dubbed the “Space Kraken” by the CEERS team.
- Two interacting spiral galaxies at z = 0.7. The arrow points to a supernova discovered with these JWST images.
- Another spiral galaxy, also at z = 0.7, again highlighting JWST’s ability to resolve small-scale features even for modestly distant galaxies.
- A chance alignment of a z = 0.63 galaxy with a tidal tail, and a grouping of red galaxies at z = 1.85.
Epoch 1 has one more crucial feature left. The team reported finding Maisie’s galaxy, which has a red shift of 11.8, making it perhaps one of the oldest galaxies ever found. Only 280 million years after the Big Bang, it might have developed. If verified, it might reveal information about the universe’s very first stages of star creation. Do not forget that this represents less than 50% of the CEERS Survey. Getting time on the Webb telescope is difficult. Around the end of 2022, the CEERS team plans to undertake the following round of observations.
