Astronomers from the James Webb Space Observatory have released a new image with fine details of a cluster of galaxies called Apple S1063 that is about 4.5 billion years away from Earth.
This means that this is the image of these galaxies about 4.5 billion years ago. To understand the idea, let’s imagine that there was an unfortunate accident, where someone broke his femur in the Egyptian city of Alexandria, which happened at 9 pm on Saturday, November 5, and for some reason there is no way we can break the news to his family in Aswan.
Someone will have to travel to Alexandria by train to deliver the news, which will arrive at 4 p.m. on Sunday, November 6. Although the person was indeed injured on the evening of November 5, the family in Aswan only found out at 4 p.m. the next day.
This is what happens with stars and galaxies, light is news from distant stars and galaxies, and when you look at a galaxy two billion light years away from us, what you have now is the news (the beam of light) that came out of it the same number of years ago.
Here’s a short video released by James Webb detailing the new image in high definition:
Gravitational lens
In the new image, a massive, bright white elliptical central galaxy, the nucleus of the Apple S1063 cluster, is shown with short, curved, glowing red arcs around it – images of distant background galaxies that have been magnified and distorted by gravitational lensing, according to statement Official press release from the James Webb Observatory platform.
Gravitational lensing explains that light travels in straight lines unless it passes by a very massive object, such as a distant galaxy or star.
In this case, the light rays are bent by the strong gravity of that galaxy or star, and as a result, we see what lies behind them in an incorrect place or as a stretched and distorted object, and sometimes, if the conditions are ideal, we see it as a bright ring around the nearest galaxy.
To understand the idea, imagine standing on the street and seeing the light of a car in the distance, but between you and it is a huge transparent glass sphere.
This ball distorts the light coming from the lamps and makes them appear strangely or in more than one location, the ball here plays the role of a “gravitational lens”, but in space the effect is gravity and not glass.
Unprecedented details
The new image offers the James Webb Observatory’s deepest look yet at a single target, captured using 9 different shots in near-infrared wavelengths, with a total observation time of about 120 hours
The image aims to study a period known as the “Dawn of the Universe”, when the universe was only a few million years old
Analyses of this data have led to the discovery of galaxy candidates believed to have existed just 200 million years after the Big Bang, helping to understand how the first galaxies in the universe formed.
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2025-06-02 04:37:00
