The first pictures from COSMOS-Web, the largest initiative of the James Webb Space Telescope, have been made public. They provide a fascinating look at a variety of galaxies, including brilliant instances of spiral galaxies, gravitational lensing, and proof of galaxy mergers.
According to a media release from the organization, JWST's Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam) and Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI) took these mosaic images in early January.
COSMOS-Web aims to map the earliest structures of the universe and will create a wide and deep survey of up to 1 million galaxies.
Over the course of 255 hours of observing time, COSMOS-Web will map 0.6 square degrees of the sky with NIRCam, roughly the size of three full moons, and 0.2 square degrees with MIRI.
"It's incredibly exciting to get the first data from the telescope for COSMOS-Web," said principal investigator Jeyhan Kartaltepe, an associate professor at Rochester Institute of Technology's School of Physics and Astronomy.
"Everything worked beautifully, and the data are even better than we expected. We've been working really hard to produce science-quality images to use for our analysis, and this is just a drop in the bucket of what's to come."
The principal investigator of COSMOS-Web, Caitlin Casey, who is an associate professor at The University of Texas at Austin, said that "This first snapshot of COSMOS-Web contains about 25,000 galaxies - an astonishing number larger than even what sits in the Hubble Ultra Deep Field,".
"It's one of the largest JWST images taken so far. And yet it's just 4 percent of the data we will get for the full survey. When it is finished, this deep field will be astoundingly large and overwhelmingly beautiful."
