Scientists from the COSMOS-Web program have published mosaic images taken in early January by the Near Infrared Cameras (NIRCam) and the Mid Infrared Instrument (MIRI) on the James Webb Space Telescope.
As part of COSMOS-Web, it is planned to map the earliest structures of the Universe and conduct a deep study of up to 1 million galaxies. Over the course of 255 hours of observations, 0.6 square degrees of the sky will be mapped by NIRCam, about the size of three full moons, and 0.2 square degrees by MIRI.
The international team of COSMOS-Web includes about 100 astronomers from all over the world.
This first COSMOS-Web image contains about 25,000 galaxies, significantly more than in the ultra-deep field of the Hubble Space Telescope. This is one of the largest images ever taken by the Webb Telescope. And yet this is only 4% of the data from the full study that scientists plan to conduct. When completed, this deep field will be astonishingly large and incredibly beautiful.
COSMOS-Web has three main scientific goals: expanding our understanding of the epoch of reionization, approximately 200,000 to 1 billion years after the Big Bang; identification and characterization of early massive galaxies in the first 2 billion years; and studying how dark matter has evolved along with the stellar composition of galaxies.
Source: Caitlin M. Casey et al, COSMOS-Web: An Overview of the JWST Cosmic Origins Survey, arXiv (2022). DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2211.07865
