Cosmic Christmas tree! NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope takes stunning photo of a colorful cluster of galaxies with flickering lights
- It depicted 14 new transient objects that resembled flickering ‘Christmas lights’
- The cluster of galaxies is called MACS041 and is located 4.3 billion light-years away
With the holidays quickly approaching, NASA’s super space telescope is jumping on the Christmas bandwagon.
James Webb has captured a spectacular image of what astronomers call the ‘Christmas Tree Galaxy Cluster’: a colorful array of cosmic entities with fourteen flickering ‘lights’ at their hearts.
These newly discovered lights are actually so-called transient objects, phenomena that brighten dramatically and then fade, hence the twinkling.
Spotted with the help of Webb’s predecessor – the iconic Hubble Space Telescope – they are located in a cluster of galaxies 4.3 billion light-years from Earth, officially known as MACS041.
In fact, astronomers could get an early Christmas present as they believe many more of these transients could be discovered within the Christmas Tree Galaxy Cluster.
James Webb has captured a spectacular image of what astronomers call the ‘Christmas Tree Galaxy Cluster’ – a colorful array of cosmic entities with flickering ‘lights’ at their hearts
Where the lights flicker: These newly discovered lights are actually so-called transient objects, phenomena that brighten dramatically and then fade, hence the twinkling. Pictured are the areas where astronomers discovered the transients
“We call MACS0416 the Christmas Tree Galaxy Cluster, both because it is so colorful and because of the flickering lights we find within it,” said Haojing Yan, associate professor at the University of Missouri’s Department of Physics and Astronomy.
‘Transients are objects in space, such as individual stars, that suddenly appear to brighten by orders of magnitude and then fade away.
‘These transient objects appear bright for only a short time and then disappear; it’s like we’re looking through a shifting magnifying glass.’
The astronomers discovered the transients by studying four sets of images taken by Webb over a four-month period.
What turned out to be particularly exciting – besides the obvious festive nature of the cluster – is that two of these transients are supernovae, which are stars at the end of their lives.
This is useful for astronomers because it allows them to study the host galaxies of such phenomena, essentially “creating a completely new view of the universe.”
“The two supernovae and the other twelve extremely magnified stars are of different natures, but they are all important,” Yan said.
‘We have been monitoring the change in brightness over time through their light curves, and by examining in detail how the light changes over time, we will eventually be able to know what type of stars they are.
‘More importantly, we can understand the detailed structure of the magnifying glass and how this relates to the distribution of dark matter.’
A little help from my friend: The lights were spotted with help from Webb’s predecessor – the iconic Hubble Space Telescope (image left) – and are located in a cluster of galaxies 4.3 billion light-years from Earth officially known as MACS041
Behemoth: Within one of the galaxies is a monster star called ‘Mothra’ (bottom right), which can be seen as it was when the 13.7 billion year old universe was only 3 billion years old
The astronomers also came across something else special.
In one of the galaxies there is a monster star that can be seen as it was when the 13.7 billion year old universe was relatively young, just three billion years old.
The researchers have named the star ‘Mothra’ – after the monstrous moth Kaiju from Japanese cinema – and believe it has a mass between 10,000 and 1 million times that of the Sun.
Webb launched on Christmas Day 2021 with the aim of looking back in time to the dawn of the universe.
To that end, researchers have been able to calculate that light from the Christmas Tree Galaxy Cluster began its journey to us when our now 4.6 billion-year-old solar system was newly formed and was about 300 million years old.
Two articles have been published on the imaging of the cluster.
One is in the news Astronomy and astrophysics and the other has been accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal, with a preprint available in the research repository arXiv.
The James Webb Telescope: NASA’s $10 billion telescope is designed to detect light from the earliest stars and galaxies
The James Webb Telescope has been described as a ‘time machine’ that could help unlock the secrets of our universe.
The telescope will be used to look back at the first galaxies that formed in the early universe more than 13.5 billion years ago, and to observe the sources of stars, exoplanets and even the moons and planets of our solar system.
The massive telescope, which has already cost more than $7 billion (£5 billion), is considered a successor to the orbiting Hubble Space Telescope.
The James Webb telescope and most of its instruments have an operating temperature of about 40 Kelvin – about minus 387 Fahrenheit (minus 233 degrees Celsius).
It is the world’s largest and most powerful orbital space telescope, able to look back 100 to 200 million years after the Big Bang.
The orbiting infrared observatory is designed to be about 100 times more powerful than its predecessor, the Hubble Space Telescope.
NASA likes to think of James Webb as a successor to Hubble rather than a replacement, as the two will work together for a while.
The Hubble Telescope was launched on April 24, 1990 via the space shuttle Discovery from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
It orbits the Earth at a speed of about 17,300 miles per hour in a low Earth orbit, at an altitude of about 340 miles.