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4h ago

Webb Telescope Team Unveils Most Detailed Map of the Universe’s Cosmic Web

The public release gives researchers the tools to test how galaxy growth tracks the filaments and voids that shape the cosmos.

James Webb telescope (left) landscape of star birth by James Webb telescope (right)
Image
A slice through the COSMOS-Web cosmic-web map, showing galaxies across nearly 14 billion years of cosmic history. The vertex on the left marks the present day; moving outward, each galaxy is placed at its distance in cosmic time, reaching back to when the universe was less than a billion years old. Bright yellow regions show the dense clusters and filaments of the cosmic web, while dark regions mark the near-empty voids in between. image: © Hossein Hatamnia, UC Riverside.

Overview

  • Astronomers using NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope mapped the cosmic web in greater detail than ever, reaching back to when the universe was about one billion years old.
  • The COSMOS-Web survey, the largest JWST program to date, covers a sky area about the size of three full Moons to trace galaxy networks across 13.7 billion years.
  • The team released an open pipeline, large-scale density maps, an evolutionary video, and a catalog of 164,000 galaxies for anyone to analyze.
  • Webb’s infrared sensitivity finds many more faint, distant galaxies and measures their distances more precisely, exposing filaments and clusters that Hubble blurred together.
  • The study, led by UC Riverside with an international team and published in The Astrophysical Journal, positions scientists to link environment to how galaxies form and change.