Madrid. A new image of the galaxy cluster known as El Gordo reveals distant, dusty objects never seen before, and provides a wealth of new science.
The infrared image, taken by the telescope James Webb from NASA, shows a variety of unusual and distorted background galaxies only hinted at in earlier Hubble photographs.
El Gordo is a cluster of hundreds of galaxies that existed when the universe was 6.2 billion years old, making it a “cosmic teenager.” It is the most massive group known up to that time, NASA reported.
The team, led by Brenda Fyre of the University of Arizona, singled out El Gordo because it acts like a natural cosmic magnifying glass through a phenomenon known as gravitational lensing. Its powerful gravity bends and distorts light from objects behind it, like glasses.
In the image, one of the most striking features is a bright arc depicted in red at the top right. nicknamed The hook According to the team that made the observation, the light from this galaxy took 10.6 billion years to reach Earth. Its distinctive color is due to a combination of the reddening of the dust within the cosmic ensemble and the shifting to the cosmological hue due to its extreme distance.
By correcting for the distortions created by the lens, the team was able to determine that the background galaxy is disk-shaped, but only 26,000 light-years across, almost a quarter the size of the Milky Way. They were also able to study the galaxy’s star formation history and found that star formation was rapidly diminishing at the center of that celestial body, a process known as extinction.
Another prominent feature in the image of Webb it’s a long, pencil-thin line to the left of center. known as The skinny girlis another lensed background set whose light also took nearly 11 billion years to reach Earth.
Not far away, there is another galaxy. When the experts examined it closely, they found a single red giant that they named Quyllur, Quechua for star.
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