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James Webb captures another stunning image of thousands of distant galaxies

By Georgina Torbet Published April 30, 2025

This new Picture of the Month from the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope features an astounding number of galaxies. The objects in this frame span an incredible range of distances, from stars within our own Milky Way, marked by diffraction spikes, to galaxies billions of light-years away. — This new Picture of the Month from the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope features an astounding number of galaxies. The objects in this frame span an incredible range of distances, from stars within our own Milky Way, marked by diffraction spikes, to galaxies billions of light-years away. ESA/Webb, NASA & CSA, G. Gozaliasl, A. Koekemoer, M. Franco, and the COSMOS-Web team

This new image from the James Webb Space Telescope shows a glittering backdrop of thousands of galaxies, including a particular galactic group which is part of the COSMOS-Web field and is far enough away that we are seeing it as it was when the universe was half its current age. This is one of James Webb’s key abilities — the telescope can see objects that are so distant, it is like looking back in time . That’s because it takes time for light to travel from these distant objects to us, so the way that we see them is how they looked when the light left them. If you can see an object that is far enough away, you can see it as it was at an earlier point in the universe.

The COSMOS-Web survey takes advantage of this ability, bringing together data from different space telescopes like Webb and the Hubble Space Telescope, which look in the infrared and optical wavelengths respectively, along with the European Space Agency’s XMM-Newton observatory which looks in the X-ray wavelength. For the survey, all of these different telescopes are pointed toward one particular area of the sky, known as a field, to gather data on galaxy groups and how these huge structures are created and evolve.

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With Webb’s far-reaching sensitivity, the survey has found galaxy groups from the first 2 billion years of the universe, when it was 14% of its current age. By looking back at these early periods of the universe, researchers want to learn more about how galaxies are formed, and how they come together into groups, and then how these groups can become part of huge structures called clusters that can have thousands of galaxies gravitationally bound together.

You can see how different telescopes work together for this research in a second version of the image, which shows Webb’s observations plus the purple splodge that indicates hot gas which is giving off X-rays, as captured by both XMM-Newton and another X-ray observatory called Chandra.

This hot gas is important as researchers know that many galaxy clusters have large amounts of intergalactic gas, and that this gas could effect the way that galaxies form stars and evolve. Scientists are still working to understand why this gas remains so hot , when it seems that it should cool down over time. The gas in some clusters appears to be “ sloshing around ” as it is pushed and pulled by the enormous gravitational forces of galaxies as they collide and merge.

Georgina Torbet

Space Writer

Georgina has been the space writer at Digital Trends space writer for six years, covering human space exploration, planetary…

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James Webb captures a rare astronomical ring in the sky

This new NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope Picture of the Month features a rare cosmic phenomenon called an Einstein ring. What at first appears to be a single, strangely shaped galaxy is actually two galaxies that are separated by a large distance. The closer foreground galaxy sits at the center of the image, while the more distant background galaxy appears to be wrapped around the closer galaxy, forming a ring.

A striking new image from the James Webb Space Telescope shows a rare object called an Einstein ring. This shows what appears to be a ring-shaped object in the sky, but is actually created by two separate galaxies and the epic forces of gravity.

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The most distant galaxy ever discovered holds a surprising secret

This is an artist’s impression of JADES-GS-z14-0, which as of today is the most distant confirmed galaxy. Galaxies in the early Universe tend to be clumpy and irregular. Supernova explosions in this galaxy would have spread heavy elements forged inside stars, like oxygen, which has been now detected with the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA).

Tools like the James Webb Space Telescope are allowing scientists to look further back into the history of the universe than ever before, discovering incredibly distant objects like a galaxies from the first few hundred million years of the universe. Now, astronomers have looked at galaxy JADES-GS-z14-0, the most distant galaxy known, and found something even more remarkable: indications of oxygen present there.

This galaxy is so far away that its light took 13.4 billion years to reach us, meaning that we get a view of what it looked like just 300 million years after the Big Bang. For such a young galaxy in the early stage of the universe, scientists would expect to find lots of hydrogen and helium as these elements were present in the earliest galaxies -- but using a ground-based telescope called ALMA (Atacama Large Millimeter Array), they also found oxygen. That wouldn't have been expected to turn up until the galaxy was much older.