Scientists have revealed the largest map of the universe ever.
An international team has created the most detailed map to date, cataloguing nearly 800,000 galaxies and reaching back almost to the dawn of time.
The COSMOS-Web project, built from data collected by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), spans 98% of cosmic history and challenges long-held ideas about the early universe.
The composite image produced reaches back about 13.5 billion years. According to NASA, the universe is about 13.8 billion years old, give or take one hundred million years.
Led by UC Santa Barbara’s Caitlin Casey and RIT’s Jeyhan Kartaltepe, the team’s new map dwarfs previous efforts, covering an area that would be a 13-foot-wide mural if printed at the same depth as the Hubble Ultra Deep Field.
The data reveal about ten times more early galaxies than expected, along with supermassive black holes previously unseen, prompting fresh questions about how quickly the universe evolved after the Big Bang.
UC Santa Barbara physics professor Caitlin Casey, who co-leads the COSMOS-Web collaboration alongside Jeyhan Kartaltepe of the Rochester Institute of Technology, said: “Our goal was to construct this deep field of space on a physical scale that far exceeded anything that had been done before.
“If you had a printout of the Hubble Ultra Deep Field on a standard piece of paper,” she said, referring to the iconic view of nearly 10,000 galaxies released by NASA in 2004, “our image would be slightly larger than a 13-foot by 13-foot-wide mural, at the same depth. So it’s really strikingly large.”
The entire dataset is now publicly available, allowing astronomers worldwide to explore the formation and evolution of galaxies—and possibly uncover new cosmic mysteries. The accompanying scientific papers have been submitted to the Astrophysical Journal and Astronomy & Astrophysics.
