Researchers Create The Most Expansive Space Map Containing 800,000 galaxies

Space is such a massive phenomenon that it is almost impossible for anyone to grasp it in one go. However, a new map comes pretty close to fulfilling this pursuit, according to IFL Science. This map has been put into place by a multinational scientific collaboration, COSMOS, and the map has been called COSMOS-Web. It has been created with the help of insights from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). In total, it contains 800,000 galaxies and is more expansive than any other map of this kind ever published to date. The oldest galaxies featured in the COSMOS-Web are 13.5 billion light years away from Earth, which further implies that it captured space when the universe was just 2% of its current age.

Before the COSMOS-Web, the most expansive view of the sky was possibly the Hubble Ultra Deep Field (UDF). It features 10,000 galaxies observed by the Hubble Space Telescope. The COSMOS-Web is much larger than UDF. “If you had a printout of the Hubble Ultra Deep Field on a standard piece of paper, our image would be slightly larger than a 13-foot by 13-foot-wide [4x4 meters] mural, at the same depth. So it’s really strikingly large,” University of California (UC), Santa Barbara physics professor Caitlin Casey shared.

Researchers believe that many galaxies in the map existed in the infant universe, according to Live Science. The estimated area covered by the map is around 0.54 degrees-squared arc of the sky, which is approximately three times the space taken by the moon viewed from Earth. The region of space that has been focused on the map has been nicknamed the COSMOS field by experts working on the project. The COSMOS field has been specifically chosen for this map because the patch contains very few stars, gas clouds, and other astronomical features that could act as barriers in viewing the universe for space telescopes. For a long time, scientists have been surveying the area using as many wavelengths of light as possible. 

For this map, the JWST captured the light coming from the galaxies. In the case of many older galaxies, the visible light released by them got stretched out due to the large distance, which turned into infrared light. JWST was the best space telescope to capture this kind of light, as it was built to focus on faint and stretched-out signals that come from the beginning of time in space. Casey claimed that with the help of JWST, experts have been able to see ten times more galaxies than they did before, and that too at incredible distances. 

To create the massive map, a team of experts worked for two years on specific data gathered by the JWTS, according to the Daily Mail. The map has already challenged some previous assertions held by astronomers. In the past, experts assumed that galaxies must have been rare in the first 500 million years of the universe. The assertion aligned with the data collected by the Hubble Telescope. However, COSMOS-Web showed way more galaxies than experts predicted during that period. 

The map has been made available on an interactive link. People can zoom in to see a particular galaxy or zoom out to have a collective view of several galaxies. Several other imaging tools have been provided to give viewers an in-depth look at the map. Researchers are hopeful that more experts looking into the map would aid in solving multiple mysteries of the universe.