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This NASA\/ESA\/CSA James Webb Space Telescope\u00a0Picture of the Month\u00a0brings us a scene from the distant Universe. Pictured here is the galaxy cluster MACS J1149.5+2223, or MACS J1149 for short, which is located about 5 billion light-years away in the constellation\u00a0Leo.<\/p>\n
Galaxy clusters are the largest structures in the Universe that are held together by gravity. Astronomers have confirmed more than 300 galaxies belonging to the MACS J1149 cluster, and they\u2019ve identified several hundred more possible members. At the cluster\u2019s centre, a huddle of ghostly elliptical galaxies rules over the cluster with their immense gravity.<\/p>\n
The crushing gravity of this cluster does more than just hold all the galaxies together as they drift through space. As light from galaxies located behind the cluster makes its way toward our telescope, journeying for billions of years, its path through spacetime is bent by the mass of the intervening galaxies.<\/p>\n
This phenomenon is called\u00a0gravitational lensing, and the result is evident in this image of MACS J1149; scattered across the image are subtle and not-so-subtle examples of gravitational lensing, from galaxies that appear to have been stretched into narrow streaks of light to galaxy images that have morphed into strange shapes.<\/p>\n
A fantastic example of gravitational lensing can be seen near the centre of the image, just below the brilliant white galaxies at the heart of the cluster. There, the image of a galaxy with distinct spiral arms has been stretched into something resembling a pink jellyfish. This tangled-looking galaxy is home to what was once the\u00a0most distant single star ever discovered\u00a0as well as\u00a0a supernova whose image appeared four times at once.<\/p>\n
MACS J1149 has long received the celebrity treatment from leading telescopes, and for good reason. This cluster was one of six investigated through the NASA\/ESA Hubble Space Telescope\u2019s\u00a0Frontier Fields\u00a0programme. The Frontier Fields galaxy clusters were selected for the strength of their gravitational lensing, and their ability to warp spacetime has granted researchers a glimpse into the early Universe.<\/p>\n
Now, Webb is pushing our knowledge horizon to even earlier times, enabling new discoveries like a\u00a0feasting supermassive black hole\u00a0less than 600 million years after the Big Bang. Using Webb\u2019s Near-Infrared Spectrograph (NIRSpec), Near-InfraRed Camera (NIRCam), and Near-InfraRed Imager and Slitless Spectrograph (NIRISS), researchers are revealing never-before-seen details of the lives of early galaxies.<\/p>\n
The Webb data used to create this image were collected as part of the CAnadian NIRISS Unbiased Cluster Survey (CANUCS) programme #1208\u00a0(PI: C. J. Willott). This programme uses Webb\u2019s sensitive instruments to unveil the evolution of low-mass galaxies in the early Universe, revealing their star formation, dust and chemistry. These data will also help researchers study the epoch of reionisation, when the first stars and galaxies lit up the Universe, map the distribution of mass within galaxy clusters, and understand how star formation can slow to a trickle in a cluster environment.\u00a0<\/p>\n
[Image description<\/i>: A Webb image of many glowing galaxies in deep space, in various shapes and colours, on a black background. There are some large, blue spiral galaxies, some large and pale white elliptical galaxies, and many orange and red, medium-sized galaxies. Even smaller galaxies, down to tiny faint spots, appear in all these colours.]<\/p>\n
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