Astronomers are already unscrambling the warped galaxies seen by JWST

The primary deep-field picture from the James Webb Area Telescope is stuffed with distant galaxies with their mild warped by gravity, and astronomers are already utilizing them to hunt darkish matter

By Leah Crane

The firehose of James Webb Area Telescope (JWST) information has opened, and astronomers have begun to drink from it. Simply days after the observatory’s first full-resolution picture was launched on 11 July, two teams of researchers have already analysed the information to reconstruct the construction of the galaxy cluster within the image.

The cluster, known as SMACS 0723, is so huge that it warps space-time, bending and magnifying the sunshine from the galaxies behind it in a course of known as gravitational lensing. It’s the deepest …