Astronomers from the COSMOS-Web program released mosaic images taken in early January 2023 by the Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam) and Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI) onboard the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope.
“It’s incredibly exciting to get the first data from the telescope for COSMOS-Web,” said Dr. Jeyhan Kartaltepe, an astronomer at Rochester Institute of Technology and principal investigator of the COSMOS-Web program.
“Everything worked beautifully and the data are even better than we expected.”
“We’ve been working really hard to produce science quality images to use for our analysis and this is just a drop in the bucket of what’s to come.”
“This first snapshot of COSMOS-Web contains about 25,000 galaxies — an astonishing number larger than even what sits in the Hubble Ultra Deep Field,” added Dr. Caitlin Casey, an astronomer at University of Texas at Austin and principal investigator of the COSMOS-Web program.
“It’s one of the largest Webb images taken so far. And yet it’s just 4% of the data we will get for the full survey.”
“When it is finished, this deep field will be astoundingly large and overwhelmingly beautiful.”
COSMOS-Web aims to map the earliest structures of the Universe and will create a wide and deep survey of up to one million galaxies.
Over the course of 255 hours of observing time, the survey will map 0.6 square degrees of the sky with Webb’s NIRCam instrument, roughly the size of three full moons, and 0.2 square degrees with MIRI.
COSMOS-Web has three primary science goals:
(i) furthering our understanding of the Reionization Era, roughly 200,000 years to one billion years after the Big Bang;
(ii) identifying and characterizing early massive galaxies in the first 2 billion years;
(iii) and studying how dark matter has evolved with the stellar content of galaxies.
COSMOS-Web is the widest area Webb will observe in its first year, enabling the study of galaxies across a wide range of local…
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