Astronomers Use The Webb Telescope To Improve Our Map Of The Cosmic Web
We love when astronomers share the images they capture with the James Webb Space Telescope because they are so beautiful and cool. But of course, science is about more than pretty pictures. A research team used the telescope to map the cosmic web, a collection of dark matter, gases and filaments that connect larger entities in space. As the University of California, Riverside blog post describes, the cosmic web “forms the underlying architecture of the cosmos, linking galaxies and clusters into a single, complex, and large-scale structure.” Using the James Webb Space Telescope, this team created the most detailed map yet of this fundamental structure.
“The jump in depth and resolution is really significant, and we can now see the cosmic web at a time when the universe was only a few hundred million years old, a time that was essentially out of reach before JWST,” said Bahram Mobasher, UCR professor and researcher on the study. “What once looked like a single structure now resolves into several, and details that were previously smoothed out are now clearly visible.”
“For the first time, we can study the evolution of galaxies in clusters and filamentary structures through cosmic time, from when the universe was a billion years old to the near universe,” according to lead author Hossein Hatamnia, a graduate student at UCR and the Carnegie Observatories.
The academic article covering the development of this investigation was published in The Astrophysics Journal.
