The largest map of the universe is now available thanks to James Webb. And it can be explored as if it were Google Maps

Astronomers They were convinced that the primitive universe was a dark place. That the galaxies took to appear after the Big Bang. But the new largest and most deep map of the universe, which extends until 13.5 billion years ago thanks to the observations of the James Webb space telescope, has just dynamited this idea.

You can explore it yourself. Is called Cosmos-Weband it is not just a mosaic of images. It is a detailed catalog of almost 800,000 galaxies that covers 98% of the entire history of the universe in a specific region of heaven, thanks to the extraordinary sensitivity of the Webb Observatory.

This gigantic panoramic is the result of More than 255 hours of observations of the NASA space telescope, ESA and the CSA, pointing to a region with very few stars or clouds of gas that block their vision towards the confines of the cosmos. The result is the largest contiguous image captured by the Webb to date, with more than 10,000 individual exhibitions.

Comparisons are hateful. One way to understand the scale of this map is comparing it to the famous “Ultra -Profundo del Hubble”, the most detailed image of the universe in visible light. If we had a printed copy of the hubble ultraprophound field on a sheet of paper, Cosmos-Web would be a mural of almost 4 by 4 meters with the same depth.

The Webb telescope observes wavelengths other than those of the Hubble, those of the nearby infrared and the middle infrared, but its instruments are so sensitive that you can see those 800,000 galaxies over 13.5 billion years in a region equivalent to three moons full in the night sky.

Too much light, too soon. The great surprise of these images is not their depth, something for which the webb was designedbut what they reveal from the primitive universe. Astronomers believed that there would barely galaxies in the first 500 million years of the universe were incredibly rare, but there are approximately 10 times more galaxies than expected.

“Since the James Webb space telescope went on, we have been wondering if your data They break the cosmological model“, admits Caitlin Casey, leader of the Cosmos-Web project.” The primitive universe only had about 400 million years to form one billion solar masses in stars. We just don’t know how it could happen. “

The role of Spain and open science. This monumental effort would not have been possible without a globa collaboration. And this is where Spain plays a role from the Institute of Astrophysics of the Canary Islands (IAC), which applied neural networks for the morphological classification of more than half a million catalog galaxies, an essential task to understand its evolution.

But Cosmos-Web would not have been possible without the work of volunteers who, from their homes, helped for two years to process the raw data and correct artifacts of the Webb Telescope. Similarly, now anyone can explore the map and make their own discoveries.

Cosmos-Web will continue to expand with new spectroscopic observations to analyze the internal chemistry of the most interesting galaxies. The main objectives are the “era of reion” (when the light of the first stars cleared the cosmic fog), the evolution of mass galaxies and how dark matter is related to visible matter.

Image | Cosmos-Web

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