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
You have five years after expiration to renew it without having to start over from scratch.
I just sent my renewal in the other day after my passport was expired for 15 months.
I have no plans to travel outside the US, I just started to feel naked without a passport after having one for so long.
Been more than 5 now. Plus, we have the gold star on our d’s if we want to fly in the states. Which we don’t want to do anymore.
At some point, some guy or gal is going to come along, and like Galileo, Einstein and others, turn their entire cosmology upside down with their observations and datasets.
It’s been a while since we had one of those types, so maybe it will happen sooner rather than later................
Only when they’re able to see beyond what we think is the 13.8 billion light years distance, is when we’ll know the universe is older than we thought. So far, we can still only see 13.5.
Yes, St. John said he saw a new heaven and a new earth after the old ones rolled up like a scroll.
I picture the heavens parting like a curtain and the glory of God and Jesus and the entirety of the Heavenly Host is suddenly revealed in an instant..................
...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 math seems a little off, doesn’t it?
Explain this to AMA, CDC, Big Pharma, etc.
That’s because the Red Shift is down into the Infra Red region.
As more sensitive telescopes are invented we will see even more farther back.
And be amazed even more all over again!.....................
Yes, every time we build a bigger and better telescope, it breaks our expectations.
It’s that ‘New Math’ stuff I never understood in school.............🤔
I wish I remembered how they calculated how old the universe was. Seems the universe is too big to have traveled even at the speed of light from the cosmic egg. Now we find out it was also too mature too early. I’m left wondering if we’re getting enough evidence to reconsider the scale of cosmic hyperinflation. Maybe it was more like the 1970s than Venezuela?
The universe didn’t break any rules. The rules are made by humans in their feeble attempts to understand the universe. The rules don’t fully explain the universe, so new rules are needed.
Their? “They” are just everywhere.
From BRAVE AI:
How Old Universe Was Calculated
The age of the universe is calculated using two main methods. The first method involves measuring the rate of expansion of the universe and extrapolating back to the Big Bang. This is done by determining the Hubble constant, which is a measure of the current expansion rate of the universe.
The Hubble constant (H0) is a measure of the current expansion rate of the universe. Cosmologists use this measurement to extrapolate back to the Big Bang.
The age of the universe is related to the Hubble constant, and it is between 1/Ho and 2/3Ho depending on cosmological models adopted.
The second method involves looking for the oldest stars. Astronomers can place a lower limit to the age of the universe by studying globular clusters. Globular clusters are a dense collection of roughly a million stars. Stellar densities near the center of the globular cluster are enormous. If we lived near the center of one, there would be several hundred thousand stars closer to us than Proxima Centauri, the star nearest to the Sun.
The oldest globular clusters contain only stars less massive than 0.7 solar masses. These low mass stars are much dimmer than the Sun. This suggests that the oldest globular clusters are between 11 and 18 billion years old.
In addition, the age of the universe can be determined by measuring the cosmic microwave background (CMB). The universe started out as scorching plasma, in which packets of light, or photons, were attached to electrons. It eventually cooled enough for photons to break free of the electrons, leave the plasma and scatter throughout space, forming what is now known as the CMB. So, by measuring how far away such scattered light is, scientists get an estimate of how old the universe is.
The first estimate of the age of the universe came from the calculation of when all of the objects must have started speeding out from the same point.
Hubble’s initial value for the universe’s age was very low, as the galaxies were assumed to be much closer than later observations found them to be. The first reasonably accurate measurement of the rate of expansion of the universe, a numerical value now known as the Hubble constant, was made in 1958 by astronomer Allan Sandage. His measured value for the Hubble constant came very close to the value range generally accepted today.
In 2018, the Planck Collaboration updated its estimate for the age of the universe to 13.787±0.020 billion years.
Calculating the age of the universe is accurate only if the assumptions built into the models being used to estimate it are also accurate. This is referred to as strong priors and essentially involves stripping the potential errors in other parts of the model to render the accuracy of actual observational data directly into the concluded result.
The age given is thus accurate to the specified error, since this represents the error in the instrument used to gather the raw data input into the model.
The age of the universe based on the best fit to Planck 2018 data alone is 13.787±0.020 billion years.
A component to the analysis of data used to determine the age of the universe (e.g. from Planck) is to use a Bayesian statistical analysis, which normalizes the results based upon the priors (i.e.
AI-generated answer. Please verify critical facts.
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space.com
How old is the universe? | Space
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livescience.com
How do we know the age of the universe? | Live Science
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en.wikipedia.org
Age of the universe - Wikipedia
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+ 3 more
It has always been counterintuitive to me that the Big Bang would produce a cloud of gas that would take millions or billions of years to coalgaless into galaxies.
Why would the Big Bang, previously an infinitely dense bit of matter, not breakup into an infinitely large number of varyingly smaller and larger bits of matter that may or my not clump together to form an infinite diverse collection of matter.
I always thought that the Big Bang would have produced Black Holes from the very beginning.
In that case there would be Galaxies forming from the very beginning.
He isn’t and never has been a scientist.
True.
The cosmologists assume uniform placement of matter in the Post-Big Bang era.
Anyone that has seen the damage and distribution of debris in the aftermath of an explosion of any sort knows this cannot happen..................
He hasn’t been around spewing his propaganda lately, I wonder what the ‘Crazed Sex Poodle’ is up to?............
The baseline is wrong.
And from the article: “The cosmos is organized in dense regions and voids,”
What you say is what I suspect also and the speed of light is not constant but has voids and older areas where spacetime is running differently to the outside observer.
Poor reporting. If you go by area, I think it’s closer to 7x as large as Hubble, but 6x is in the ballpark. ~45 ft sq. (say 50) vs ~346 ft sq. (say 350) Assuming my pi x (r*2) calc is correct.
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