A visual feast of galaxies, from infrared to X-ray

On the left, the new Picture of the Month from the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope features an astounding number of galaxies. On the right, as a blue glow, we see also the X-ray light coming from the blazing hot gas that fills the space between the galaxies. The objects in this frame span an incredible range of distances, from stars within our own Milky Way, marked by diffraction spikes, to galaxies billions of light-years away. The focus of this image is a group of galaxies, the largest concentration of which can be found just below the centre of this image. These galaxies glow with white-gold light. We see this galaxy group as it appeared when the Universe was 6.5 billion years old, a little less than half the Universe’s current age. The galaxy group pictured here is the most massive group in what’s called the COSMOS-Web field. COSMOS stands for Cosmic Evolution Survey. This survey has enlisted several telescopes, including Webb, the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, and ESA ... Read full article.