The NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) continues to produce breathtaking images of the universe. Webb’s Near Infrared Camera (NIRCam) instrument captured this image of galaxy cluster MACS0647 and the very distant galaxy MACS0647-JD.
The galaxy cluster appears as a sea of galaxies on a black background to the left of the above image, and three small boxes outlined in white mark the locations of the three images of galaxy MACS0647-JD. These photos are labelled JD1, JD2, and JD3.
“MACS0647’s massive gravity acts as a cosmic lens, bending and magnifying light from the more distant MACS0647-JD system. It also triple-lensinged the JD system, causing its image to appear in three different places “NASA stated in a blog post.
MACS0647-JD has been observed by a team of astronomers led by Dan Coe of AURA/STScI for the European Space Agency and the Johns Hopkins University, Tiger Hsiao of the Johns Hopkins University, and Rebecca Larson of the University of Texas at Austin. MAC0647-JD NIRCam observations are part of the team’s Cycle 1 programme GO 1433. (PI Coe).
In response to the latest findings, Coe stated, “I discovered MACS0647-JD with the Hubble Space Telescope ten years ago. I’d never worked on high redshift galaxies before, but then I came across this one, which was potentially the most distant at redshift 11, about 97 percent of the way back to the big bang. It was just this pale, red dot with Hubble. We could tell it was tiny, a tiny galaxy in the first 400 million years of the universe. Now that we have Webb, we can resolve TWO objects! We’re still debating whether these are two galaxies or two star clusters within a galaxy.”
In January 2023, the team plans to conduct a detailed study of the physical properties of the distant galaxy MAC0647-JD using Webb spectroscopy.
