![]() ![]() (Image credit: NASA/ESA/CSA/STScI/Pascale et al.) One of the new papers, from a team led by Guillaume Mahler of Durham University, concluded that most of the mass is centered on the brightest, most massive galaxy in the cluster.Įxamples of some of the lensed background galaxies in Webb's image of SMACS J0723. Whatever the final tally, these lensed images allow scientists to finetune a map of how matter - both visible and dark - is distributed in the SMACS J0723 cluster, and in turn model the shape of the lens. Another team, led by Gabriel Caminha of the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics in Germany, counted 27 new lensed images. ![]() Gravitational lenses can create multiple images of the same galaxy, so these 42 images represent 19 individual galaxies. But Webb takes the hunt to a whole new level.įrye's team, which was led by graduate student Massimo Pascale at the University of California, Berkeley, discovered 42 new lensed images in the background of the new deep-field image. Previous surveys by the Hubble Space Telescope and the retired Herschel Space Observatory had found a handful of lensed images of background galaxies in their SMACS J0723 observations. Galaxy clusters are particularly efficient lenses because they pack a huge amount of mass (in the case of SMACS J0723, about 100 trillion times the mass of the sun) into a relatively compact volume with a diameter of about 3 to 5 million light-years across. Gravitational lensing is a phenomenon in which a very massive object's gravity warps space into a shape analogous to an optical lens, resulting in light from whatever is behind the lens being distorted and magnified in brightness. "It was beautifully chosen because it was a relatively unknown target," she said. ![]()
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