Webb astronomers estimate 50,000 near-infrared sources are represented in the new image of the huge galaxy megacluster Abell 2744.
Abell 2744, also known as ACO 2744, the Pandora’s Box or the Pandora’s Cluster, is a group of roughly 500 galaxies.
It is located approximately 4 billion light-years from Earth in the direction of the constellation Sculptor.
Abell 2744 is around 350 million light-years across, and has a mass equivalent to more than 4 trillion solar masses.
Only the central core of the cluster has previously been studied in detail by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope.
By combining the powerful Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam) onboard the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope with a broad mosaic view of the region’s multiple areas of lensing, astronomers aimed to achieve a balance of breadth and depth that will open up a new frontier in the study of cosmology and galaxy evolution.
“When the images of Pandora’s Cluster first came in from Webb, we were honestly a little star struck,” said Dr. Rachel Bezanson, an astronomer at the University of Pittsburgh.
“There was so much detail in the foreground cluster and so many distant lensed galaxies, I found myself getting lost in the image. Webb exceeded our expectations.”
The new image of Abell 2744 was captured as part of the Ultradeep NIRSpec and NIRCam ObserVations before the Epoch of Reionization (UNCOVER) program.
It stitches four Webb snapshots together into one panoramic image, displaying roughly 50,000 sources of near-infrared light.
In addition to magnification, gravitational lensing distorts the appearance of distant galaxies, so they look very different than those in the foreground.
“The lensing core to the lower right in the Webb image, which has never been imaged by Hubble, Webb revealed hundreds of distant lensed galaxies that appear like faint arced lines in the image. Zooming in on the region reveals more and more of them,” said Dr. Ivo Labbe, an astronomer at the…
Read the full article here