New Webb Telescope visualization lets you fly through the ancient universe in 3D

Fasten your seatbelt for a flight through space, across thousands of galaxies, at 200 million light years per second. We’re pretty sure that’s faster than the Millenium Falcon can make Kessel Run.

JWST recently took a deep look at a patch of space known as the Extended Groth Strip, which certainly looks like somewhere you’d find in the Star Wars Universe (though you can actually find it is in the night sky between the constellations Dai Hung and Dai Hung Tinh). The Space Telescope Science Institute, which operates JWST and the Hubble Space Telescope, turned that deep-field data into a 3D flight through intergalactic space and deep into the past of the universe. .

There are at least 100,000 galaxies (that we know of) in just a narrow slice of the sky known as the Expanded Groth Strip, which stretches from our Milky Way’s nearest neighbors and crosses over 13 billion light-years, but this visualization will tour “just” 5,000 of them. en route to the Maisie Galaxy, a distant red galaxy whose light began its journey to Earth just 390 million years after the Big Bang.

Travel through space, time and spacetime

As you fly over the Extended Groth Strip, you’ll be 200 million light-years farther from home every second. At first, most passing galaxies will look quite similar to our own Milky Way: bright, complex spirals with shades of yellow, white and blue, tilted at every possible angle. But when you travel in space, you are also traveling back in time.

Light takes time to travel through space, so by the time light from a distant galaxy hits JWST’s mirrors, it’s actually a snapshot of what the galaxy looks like. in the past. And because the universe is still expanding after the Big Bang, everything we see in space is moving away from us. That motion stretches light from distant galaxies into longer wavelengths—so as you move deeper into the Strip, the galaxies around you start to appear redder. They will also be smaller and less complex. This is what galaxies looked like billions of years ago, before new star formation and mergers with other small galaxies shaped them into the giant spirals that dot the modern universe.

Near the end of your journey, you’ll pass galaxies whose light is stretched into very long wavelengths of infrared light that our eyes can’t see — but JWST can. Finally, you arrive at your final destination: a galaxy called Maisie’s Galaxy, which appeared 13.4 billion years ago, less than half a billion years after the universe formed.

“Previously we couldn’t study galaxies like Maisie’s Galaxy [JWST] because we can’t see them,» astrophysicist Rebecca Larson of the Rochester Institute of Technology said in a recent statement. “Now we can not only find them in our images, but we can also find out what they are made of and if they are different from the galaxies we see. near or not.”

The Hubble Space Telescope (which also studied the Extended Groth Strip in 2004) can see the universe in visible light, as well as shorter ultraviolet and longer infrared wavelengths, but JWST can looks deeper into the infrared spectrum and with much higher resolution, so it reveals galaxies that even the venerable (and still amazing) Hubble can’t see. The early universe turned out to have more galaxies than most astrophysicists predicted.

According to astronomer Steven Finkelstein of the University of Texas, principal investigator of CEERS, Cosmic Evolution Early Release Science Program (which collected data for the 3D journey you just took), one of the The team’s next goal is to use JWST to study how stars work. formed in those early galaxies. Astronomers want to know if stars form at a steady rate or if there are explosive outbursts that form bright, massive clusters of stars.