It’s a great big universe…
Webb’s new view of Pandora’s Cluster stitches 4 snapshots together into a panorama, showing 3 separate galaxy clusters merging into a megacluster and some 50,000+ sources of near-infrared light.
Notice that some of the galaxies are red in color and distorted. This is because the mass and gravity of the megacluster in the foreground actually magnify and warp the more distant galaxies in the back — an effect called gravitational lensing.
Only the center core of Pandora’s Cluster (or Abell 2744) has been previously studied in detail by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope. Webb’s powerful view provides astronomers a much broader and deeper look at this region.
Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, I. Labbe (Swinburne University of Technology) and R. Bezanson (University of Pittsburgh). Image processing: Alyssa Pagan (STScI)
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