Posted on 06/13/2025 5:44:18 AM PDT by Red Badger
Six images of galaxies taken from nearly 800,000, from upper left to lower right: the present-day universe, and 3, 4, 8, 9, and 10 billion years ago. Credit: M. Franco / C. Casey / COSMOS-Web collaboration
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A new cosmic deep field map from the COSMOS collaboration, powered by the James Webb Space Telescope, is rewriting what scientists thought they knew about the early universe.
Spanning nearly the full history of cosmic time and featuring nearly 800,000 galaxies, the data shows a universe forming stars and supermassive black holes far earlier—and in greater numbers—than previously predicted. This unprecedented scope offers a mural-scale view of the universe’s youth and has left researchers wondering if their core cosmological models still hold.
COSMOS Collaboration Unveils Massive Map of the Universe
In an exciting leap for open science, an international team of researchers has just released the data behind the largest map of the universe ever made. The project, called COSMOS-Web, was created using observations from the powerful James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). It includes breathtaking images and a detailed catalog of nearly 800,000 galaxies, stretching across nearly the entire history of the cosmos.
And this massive cosmic map is already challenging what scientists thought they knew about the early universe.
“Our goal was to construct this deep field of space on a physical scale that far exceeded anything that had been done before,” said UC Santa Barbara physics professor Caitlin Casey, who co-leads the COSMOS collaboration with Jeyhan Kartaltepe of the Rochester Institute of Technology. “If you had a printout of the Hubble Ultra Deep Field on a standard piece of paper,” she said, referring to the iconic view of nearly 10,000 galaxies released by NASA in 2004, “our image would be slightly larger than a 13-foot by 13-foot-wide mural, at the same depth. So it’s really strikingly large.”
Capturing 98% of Cosmic History
The new image stretches back about 13.5 billion years, nearly to the Big Bang. Since the universe is about 13.8 billion years old, this means the COSMOS-Web project captures roughly 98 percent of all cosmic history. But the goal wasn’t just to find the oldest galaxies. Scientists wanted to explore the larger environments where these galaxies were forming—places where the first stars, galaxies, and black holes were coming to life.
“The cosmos is organized in dense regions and voids,” Casey explained. “And we wanted to go beyond finding the most distant galaxies; we wanted to get that broader context of where they lived.”
A ‘Big Surprise’ in Deep Space
And what a cosmic neighborhood it turned out to be. Before JWST turned on, Casey said, she and fellow astronomers made their best predictions about how many more galaxies the space telescope would be able to see, given its 6.5 meter (21 foot) diameter light-collecting primary mirror, about six times larger than Hubble’s 2.4 meter (7 foot, 10 in) diameter mirror. The best measurements from Hubble suggested that galaxies within the first 500 million years would be incredibly rare, she said.
“It makes sense — the Big Bang happens, and things take time to gravitationally collapse and form, and for stars to turn on. There’s a timescale associated with that,” Casey explained. “And the big surprise is that with JWST, we see roughly 10 times more galaxies than expected at these incredible distances. We’re also seeing supermassive black holes that are not even visible with Hubble.” And they’re not just seeing more, they’re seeing different types of galaxies and black holes, she added.
“Since the telescope turned on we’ve been wondering ‘Are these JWST datasets breaking the cosmological model? Because the universe was producing too much light too early; it had only about 400 million years to form something like a billion solar masses of stars. We just do not know how to make that happen.”
‘Lots of Unanswered Questions’ Remain
While the COSMOS-Web images and catalog answer many questions astronomers have had about the early universe, they also spark more questions.
“Since the telescope turned on we’ve been wondering ‘Are these JWST datasets breaking the cosmological model? Because the universe was producing too much light too early; it had only about 400 million years to form something like a billion solar masses of stars. We just do not know how to make that happen,” Casey said. “So, lots of details to unpack, and lots of unanswered questions.”
Open Access for Global Discovery
In releasing the data to the public, the hope is that other astronomers from all over the world will use it to, among other things, further refine our understanding of how the early universe was populated and how everything evolved to the present day. The dataset may also provide clues to other outstanding mysteries of the cosmos, such as dark matter and physics of the early universe that may be different from what we know today.
“A big part of this project is the democratization of science and making tools and data from the best telescopes accessible to the broader community,” Casey said. The data was made public almost immediately after it was gathered, but only in its raw form, useful only to those with the specialized technical knowledge and the supercomputer access to process and interpret it. The COSMOS collaboration has worked tirelessly for the past two years to convert raw data into broadly usable images and catalogs. In creating these products and releasing them, the researchers hope that even undergraduate astronomers could dig into the material and learn something new.
“Because the best science is really done when everyone thinks about the same data set differently,” Casey said. “It’s not just for one group of people to figure out the mysteries.”
Mapping the Future of Discovery
For the COSMOS collaboration, the exploration continues. They’ve headed back to the deep field to further map and study it.
“We have more data collection coming up,” she said. “We think we have identified the earliest galaxies in the image, but we need to verify that.” To do so, they’ll be using spectroscopy, which breaks up light from galaxies into a prism, to confirm the distance of these sources (more distant = older). “As a byproduct,” Casey added, “we’ll get to understand the interstellar chemistry in these systems through tracing nitrogen, carbon and oxygen. There’s a lot left to learn and we’re just beginning to scratch the surface.”
The COSMOS-Web image is available to browse interactively; the accompanying scientific papers have been submitted to the Astrophysical Journal and Astronomy & Astrophysics.
https://cosmos2025.iap.fr/fitsmap.html
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WEBB PING!........................
Maybe the Universe is far older than they calculated. WAAAAAY older...........
Butt, butt, butt......I could have sworn they weren’t possible. 🚀
Who you gonna believe?
Your computer or your lyin’ eyes?......................
“...And the big surprise is that with JWST, we see roughly 10 times more galaxies than expected at these incredible distances....”
Then, obviously your calculations were off by at least a factor of 10, which is ‘astronomical’!
Perhaps you should just look out there and see what’s what before making any substantial theories.
Or just believe in God and let Him worry about that stuff.............
“Since the telescope turned on we’ve been wondering ‘Are these JWST datasets breaking the cosmological model?’”
“Democratization of science”
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Once again, supposedly very smart people demonstrating some rather incredible stupidity.
Just wait til they hit the 15.8 billion year images…
smh
https://cosmos2025.iap.fr/fitsmap.html
Not the best description I’ve encountered.
Must be out there somewhere.
Something is very wrong with cosmology. Of course, I have no idea what that is. One possibility is that the baseline assumption that physical laws don’t change over time is just wrong.
🤔. Well, my passport has lapsed so I can’t go anyway.
God knows
Whoever “they” are. “They” have been trying to keep it all from everyone else, huh? JWST has better capability than previous orbital observatories, which in their time were the best things going. It’s not surprising at all that new information is available. It’s exactly how the scientific method is supposed to work.
The farther away something is, the more Red Shifted its light is.
Until eventually it is shifted into the Infra-Red part of the spectrum, and becomes impossible to see with our eyes.
But, just because we can’t see it doesn’t mean there is nothing there.
There may be galaxies without number farther out there than we can possibly imagine. We just can’t detect them from where we are.
All our ‘knowledge’ of the timescale of the Universe may be nothing but trash............
why cant they just admit they are wrong about the age of the universe? they are so stuck on the time frame they cant see the obvious
We had ‘consensus’.................until we didn’t..............
Or just believe in God and let Him worry about that stuff.............
I’ll go with that. Besides scripture says He’s going to make a new heaven and new earth, so we’ll see it when it happens. My current guess is that He may follow a similar process.
Regardless, it will be very cool to see!
That’s not even close.
Correct.
They have calculated the age of the Universe at something like 14 billion years, based on their current understanding, which turns out to be woefully inadequate when something like this comes along and throws a monkey wrench into the machine...............
I was paraphrasing Algore...................
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