The COSMOS-Web survey, the largest survey ever conducted with the James Webb Space Telescope, allows astronomers to track galaxies within nebulae, clusters, and cosmic voids across nearly 13.7 billion years of the universe's history.
Astronomers using the Webb Space Telescope have created the most detailed map ever of the cosmic web, the vast structure that connects galaxies throughout the universe. The team found that this vast web began when the universe was just a billion years old.
The cosmic web is the vast, skeletal framework of the universe. It is made of massive filaments and sheets of dark matter and gas that surround vast, nearly empty regions of space. Together, these structures form the large-scale architecture of the cosmos, connecting galaxies and galaxy clusters across vast distances.
The study drew on COSMOS-Web, the largest survey ever conducted by the Web. Scientists used the survey to investigate how galaxies formed and evolved within this interconnected network over the 13.7 billion years of the universe's history.
Webb expands our view of the universe
Since its launch in 2021, Webb has transformed astronomy with its extraordinary sensitivity and clear images. Its AE instruments can detect distant, faint galaxies that previous telescopes couldn't observe, allowing scientists to look back in time and see through clouds of cosmic dust.
To take advantage of these capabilities, the COSMOS-Web observing program was developed, which is the primary system used by astronomers to obtain telescope viewing time. The survey covers a contiguous section of sky roughly the size of three full moons and is specifically designed to map the cosmic web.
"The Web has completely changed our view of the universe, and COSMOS-Web was designed from the start to give us the deep and wide view needed to see the cosmic web," said Hussein Hatamieh, the paper's lead author. "For the first time, we can study the evolution of galaxies in clusters and nebulae over cosmic time, from the time the universe was a billion years old to the nearby universe." The nearby universe refers to the region about a billion light-years from Earth.
Cosmic Web Map Reveals Hidden Structures
Professor Bahram Mobasher said the new data from Webb provide a much more detailed look at large-scale cosmic structures than previous observations from the Hubble Space Telescope. A comparison of the two datasets reveals that many structures that once seemed blurred together can now be clearly separated and examined in greater detail.
"The leap in depth and resolution is truly significant, and we can now see the cosmic web at a time when the universe was only a few hundred million light-years old, which we couldn't reach before Webb," said Mobasher. "What looked like one structure is now separated into many structures, and details that were previously smoothed out are now clearly visible."
Hatmaniya explains that the improvement comes from two important strengths of Webb working together: "The telescope detects many more faint galaxies in the same patch of sky, and the distances of these galaxies are measured with much greater precision. This allows us to place each galaxy in the right segment of cosmic time, and to refine the resolution of the map."
for the scientific article DOI: 10.3847/1538-4357/ae5bac
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