Space

Colourful group of galaxies offers peek into history of the universe

There are thousands of galaxies contained in this image, including a cluster that looks to us as it was when the universe was just 6.5 billion years old

8 May 2025

This new Picture of the Month from the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope features an astounding number of 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 star 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. More than half of the galaxies in our Universe belong to galaxy groups like the one pictured here. Studying galaxy groups is critical for understanding how individual galaxies link up to form galaxy clusters, the largest gravitationally bound structures in the Universe. Belonging to a galaxy group can also alter the course of a galaxy???s evolution through mergers and gravitational interactions. 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???s XMM-Newton space observatory to gaze deeply at a single patch of sky.?? COSMOS-Web aims to understand how massive structures like galaxy clusters came to be. Webb???s infrared capabilities and sensitive instruments have pushed the search for galaxy groups farther back into cosmic history, revealing galaxy groups as far back as when the Universe was only 1.9 billion years old ??? just 14% of its current age. This image combines infrared data from Webb???s Near-InfraRed Camera (NIRCam) instrument with further infrared observations from the Hubble Space Telescope. The X-ray data, shown in purple, highlights the presence of hot gas concentrated within the X-ray galaxy group. These X-ray data come from ESA???s XMM-Newton space observ — ESA/Webb, NASA & CSA, G. Gozaliasl, A. Koekemoer, M. Franco, and the COSMOS-Web team Acknowledgement: J. Kartaltepe and C. Casey

In the darkness of deep space, these glowing galaxies have put on a light show. Captured by observatories including the James Webb Space Telescope, this image contains thousands of galaxies, including the gold cluster near the centre that looks to us as it was when the universe was just 6.5 billion years old. The large purple cloud covering it isn’t a printing error – it shows hot gas in the region, as seen by X-ray telescopes.

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Colourful group of galaxies offers peek into history of the universe

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