good morning. November 13th Today we are heading to a galaxy cluster known as MACS0416, 4.3 billion light-years from Earth. This distant object turned out to be two clusters of galaxies colliding with each other, first discovered in images captured by the Hubble Space Telescope.
Of course, Hubble brought “deep field” astronomy to life. Publishing images There are thousands of galaxies. Now, NASA and its partners have produced even deeper-field images by combining Hubble observations with the new James Webb Space Telescope. The resulting panchromatic images combine visible and infrared light, giving us one of the most comprehensive views of the universe ever obtained.
Here’s a little more information from NASA about how this image was constructed.
To create the images, the shortest wavelengths of light were generally color-coded as blue, the longest wavelengths as red, and intermediate wavelengths as green. The wide range of wavelengths from 0.4 to 5 microns provides particularly vivid galactic landscapes.
These colors give clues about the galaxy’s distance. The bluest galaxies are relatively close together and often exhibit intense star formation, as best detected by Hubble. Redder galaxies, on the other hand, tend to be more distant and are best detected by Webb. Some galaxies appear very red because they contain large amounts of cosmic dust that tends to absorb bluer-colored starlight.
If this makes you feel a little small, that’s okay.
sauce: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI.
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