The multinational scientific cooperation project “Cosmos” recently released data related to the largest map of the universe under the name “Cosmos-Web”, which was built using data collected by the James Web spacecraft.
The map consists of all images and an index of approximately 800,000 galaxy covering almost all cosmic time, and this project has challenged the prevailing concepts of the emerging universe.
The beginning of time
Cosmos Web’s vehicle’s image is about 13.5 billion years. According to NASA, the universe is about 13.8 billion years, with an increase or decrease of 100 million years, which means that this map covers about 98% of the total cosmic time.
The goal of researchers was not just seeing some of the most interesting galaxies at the beginning of time, but also a wider perspective of the cosmic environments that were found during the beginnings of the universe, during the formation of the first stars, galaxies and black holes.
The best previous Hubble measurements have indicated that the galaxies that will appear during the first 500 million years will be very rare, this perception is logical based on the current theories of scientists, as the great explosion occurs, and the celestial bodies of stars and galaxies take time to collapse and are formed by gravity, and the stars begin to appear.
But the biggest surprise is that, using the James Webb Telescope, scientists see almost 10 times more galaxies than expected on these huge distances, as scientists have noticed the presence of massive black holes that cannot be monitored using the Hubble telescope, and this remains a mystery that requires cosmologists to search for a solution to it.
Providing the public
For this reason, astronomers from the James Webb Space Observatory provided data to the public, according to an official press release from the University of California, Santa Barbara, hoping that other astronomers from all over the world will use it, among other things, to improve our understanding of how the universe resides in its beginnings and how everything has evolved to this day.
The data collection may also provide evidence of other prominent puzzles in the universe, such as dark matter and the physics of the universe in its beginnings, which may be different from what we know today.
The data has been published almost as soon as it is collected, but only in its raw image, and it is only useful for those who have specialized technical knowledge and the ability to reach supercomputers to address and interpret them.
The Cosmos project has worked tirelessly over the past two years to convert some of these raw data into widely used images and indexes. The researchers, by creating and publishing these products, hopes that even university astronomers can delve into materials and learn something new.
Scientists and the public can browse a display image of the atlas, presented by scientists for free This link.