From toddlers to babies

esahubble_potw1819a May 7th, 2018

Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, RELICS

In the darkness of the distant Universe, galaxies resemble glowing fireflies, flickering candles, charred embers floating up from a bonfire, light bulbs softly shining. This Picture of the Week, captured by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, shows a massive group of galaxies bound together by gravity: a cluster named RXC J0032.1+1808. This image was taken by Hubbles Advanced Camera for Surveys and Wide-Field Camera 3 as part of an observing programme called RELICS (Reionization Lensing Cluster Survey). RELICS imaged 41 massive galaxy clusters with the aim of finding the brightest distant galaxies for the forthcoming NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) to study. Expected to launch in 2018, the JWST is designed to see in infrared wavelengths, which is exceedingly useful for observing distant objects. As a result of the expansion of the Universe, very distant objects are highly redshifted (their light is shifted towards the redder end of the spectrum) and so infrared telescopes are needed to study them. While Hubble currently has the ability to peer billions of years into the past to see toddler galaxies, the JWST will have the capability to study baby galaxies, the first galaxies that formed in the Universe.

Provider: Hubble Space Telescope | ESA

Image Source: https://www.spacetelescope.org/images/potw1819a/

Curator: ESA/Hubble, Garching bei München, Germany

Image Use Policy: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License