Written by Samah Labib
Wednesday, February 15, 2023 10:00 PM
Astronomers at the European Space Agency (ESA) used the James Webb Space Telescope to capture an image of a spiral galaxy similar to the Milky Way. The star system LEDA 2046648 is located a billion light-years away from our system in the constellation Hercules. It contains thousands of galaxies, trillions of stars and countless planets. According to a report by engadget.
The European Space Agency released the image on January 31, and the New York Times highlighted it this week. The space agency described it as just a calibration image “to verify the capabilities of the telescope as it was prepared for scientific operations, and it was captured by astronomers at the European Space Agency (ESA) on May 22, 2022 with an infrared camera.” Webb’s Near Infrared Telescope (NIRCam).
This ultra-powerful camera can detect longer infrared wavelengths caused by light coming from far away. Redshift describes the stretching of the wavelength of light as it travels away from us, increasing until it appears redder than expected. This is caused by the expansion of the universe: distant systems such as LEDA 2046648 continues to move away from Earth.
Most of the visible blobs surrounding LEDA 2046648 are also galaxies, although many stars can be distinguished by their diffraction height patterns, and some objects in the image may be as old as 300 million years after the Big Bang.
Of course, any image a billion light-years away means we’ve been seeing the galaxy’s light for a billion years, so astronomers are keen to study early galaxies like this (and even older galaxies) to help explain what kinds of stars condensed from the Big Bang – and how supermassive black holes ended up. in the centers of most galaxies.