A new cosmic deep field map from the COSMOS collaboration, powered by the James Webb Space Telescope, is rewriting what scientists thought they knew about the early universe.
Spanning nearly the full history of cosmic time and featuring nearly 800,000 galaxies, the data shows a universe forming stars and supermassive black holes far earlier—and in greater numbers—than previously predicted. This unprecedented scope offers a mural-scale view of the universe’s youth and has left researchers wondering if their core cosmological models still hold.
COSMOS Collaboration Unveils Massive Map of the Universe
In an exciting leap for open science, an international team of researchers has just released the data behind the largest map of the universe ever made. The project, called COSMOS-Web, was created using observations from the powerful James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). It includes breathtaking images and a detailed catalog of nearly 800,000 galaxies, stretching across nearly the entire history of the cosmos.
And this massive cosmic map is already challenging what scientists thought they knew about the early universe.
“Our goal was to construct this deep field of space on a physical scale that far exceeded anything that had been done before,” said UC Santa Barbara physics professor Caitlin Casey, who co-leads the COSMOS collaboration with Jeyhan Kartaltepe of the Rochester Institute of Technology. “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.”
Capturing 98% of Cosmic History
The new image stretches back about 13.5 billion years, nearly to the Big Bang. Since the universe is about 13.8 billion years old, this means the COSMOS-Web project captures roughly 98 percent of all cosmic history. But the goal wasn’t just to find the oldest galaxies. Scientists wanted to explore the larger environments where these galaxies were forming—places where the first stars, galaxies, and black holes were coming to life.
“The cosmos is organized in dense regions and voids,” Casey explained. “And we wanted to go beyond finding the most distant galaxies; we wanted to get that broader context of where they lived.”
A ‘Big Surprise’ in Deep Space
And what a cosmic neighborhood it turned out to be. Before JWST turned on, Casey said, she and fellow astronomers made their best predictions about how many more galaxies the space telescope would be able to see, given its 6.5 meter (21 foot) diameter light-collecting primary mirror, about six times larger than Hubble’s 2.4 meter (7 foot, 10 in) diameter mirror. The best measurements from Hubble suggested that galaxies within the first 500 million years would be incredibly rare, she said.
“It makes sense — the Big Bang happens, and things take time to gravitationally collapse and form, and for stars to turn on. There’s a timescale associated with that,” Casey explained. “And the big surprise is that with JWST, we see roughly 10 times more galaxies than expected at these incredible distances. We’re also seeing supermassive black holes that are not even visible with Hubble.” And they’re not just seeing more, they’re seeing different types of galaxies and black holes, she added.
“Since the telescope turned on we’ve been wondering ‘Are these JWST datasets breaking the cosmological model? Because the universe was producing too much light too early; it had only about 400 million years to form something like a billion solar masses of stars. We just do not know how to make that happen.”
‘Lots of Unanswered Questions’ Remain
While the COSMOS-Web images and catalog answer many questions astronomers have had about the early universe, they also spark more questions.
“Since the telescope turned on we’ve been wondering ‘Are these JWST datasets breaking the cosmological model? Because the universe was producing too much light too early; it had only about 400 million years to form something like a billion solar masses of stars. We just do not know how to make that happen,” Casey said. “So, lots of details to unpack, and lots of unanswered questions.”
Open Access for Global Discovery
In releasing the data to the public, the hope is that other astronomers from all over the world will use it to, among other things, further refine our understanding of how the early universe was populated and how everything evolved to the present day. The dataset may also provide clues to other outstanding mysteries of the cosmos, such as dark matter and physics of the early universe that may be different from what we know today.
“A big part of this project is the democratization of science and making tools and data from the best telescopes accessible to the broader community,” Casey said. The data was made public almost immediately after it was gathered, but only in its raw form, useful only to those with the specialized technical knowledge and the supercomputer access to process and interpret it. The COSMOS collaboration has worked tirelessly for the past two years to convert raw data into broadly usable images and catalogs. In creating these products and releasing them, the researchers hope that even undergraduate astronomers could dig into the material and learn something new.
“Because the best science is really done when everyone thinks about the same data set differently,” Casey said. “It’s not just for one group of people to figure out the mysteries.”
Mapping the Future of Discovery
For the COSMOS collaboration, the exploration continues. They’ve headed back to the deep field to further map and study it.
“We have more data collection coming up,” she said. “We think we have identified the earliest galaxies in the image, but we need to verify that.” To do so, they’ll be using spectroscopy, which breaks up light from galaxies into a prism, to confirm the distance of these sources (more distant = older). “As a byproduct,” Casey added, “we’ll get to understand the interstellar chemistry in these systems through tracing nitrogen, carbon and oxygen. There’s a lot left to learn and we’re just beginning to scratch the surface.”
The COSMOS-Web image is available to browse interactively; the accompanying scientific papers have been submitted to the Astrophysical Journal and Astronomy & Astrophysics.
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14 Comments
As a now eighty-one year old lay American male who was making eye-straining telescopes from old camera lenses as a teenager, my unexpected breakthrough came in 2009, when I awakened from a dream with a clear mental image of the entire earth and its field of pulsing angular lines of gravity force radiating out across the cosmos in accordance with the inverse-square law of attraction. Since, I postulate that a basic flaw in all of physics was made in 1801 by Thomas Young when he misinterpreted the scattered dots pattern of his double-slit experiments to find a non-existent ‘duality’ of particles and waves. Now, with gravity lensing generally accepted as fact, in my model of the universe individual photons are affected by individual lines of gravity force causing them to accelerate (blue shift) on expanding lines of gravity force when emitted by their sources and decelerate (red shift) on contracting lines of gravity force when arriving to earth. With video recording technical difficulties temporarily delaying a new and, hopefully, more convincing low-budget video demonstration of the pulsing angular radiating nature of gravity lines of force, I still stand by the three I’ve already uploaded (e.g., “1Gravity:” https://odysee.com/@charlesgshaver:d/1Gravity:8). I’ve been writing for years that the age and size of the universe still need to be determined.
Uh don’t you have red and blue shift reversed?? I thought red shift happened when objects (light from those objects) were moving away.
Thanks for your question. I’m saying that in my lay model of the universe the professionals are getting it backwards.
You’re right. The models in the paper I sent to NASA two years ago predicted the DESI results, and those models show a universe that did not emerge from a singularity.
Robert, I’m not saying that the there wasn’t a Big Bang, just that the speed of light is not constant in deep space, that the red shift perceived from earth is only about half of the picture and that the age, size and expansion of the universe still need to be determined. Also, while relying heavily on professional findings of a Big Bang, all of the various rotary motion observed in the cosmos suggests a Big Bang from a central source singularity to lay me.
The Universe getting slingshot past a >3-d singularity would give the same effects, and would require fewer placeholders like D.E. ; it would actually explain some of them.
Yes, it’s a batty idea, but BBT was once, also.
Charles,
Gravitational lensing happens because light follows curved paths, not because light speeds up or slows down due to gravity. From your posts, I get the sense that you are assuming that the speed of light is a function of gravity.
When we draw gravitational lines of force, we draw only a few of them. Will your model still work if you drew infinite number of them? The lines of force are useful for solving problems; they don’t have any physical manifestation. The physical manifestation of gravity is curved space(time), not the lines of force.
Finally, there are two double slit experiments.
One using just light – this shows the wave nature of light.
You seem to be referring to the other double slit experiment which uses electrons. This is the one that shows wave-particle duality.
In your explanations, you use only photons, not electrons. So, it is not clear how your explanations address wave-particle duality.
AG3, I can see cosmic lensing as individual lines of gravity force influencing individual photons (minimally). As I commented a few weeks ago, to which I’ve been having technical difficulties with the low budget video recordings, I had planned to upload a new video to my own channel by now of a hopefully irrefutable demonstration of disengagement and re-engagement between the local fields of gravity of two aluminum disks and earth’s ambient field. A few more hours today and I should have all the clips I need to prove my point, with added comments on theory and an original new definition of inertia, uploaded by the end of this week. I’ve read that double-slit experiments have also been done with large molecules. Thanks for the input.
Gee, how about no big bang entertained for just a fraction of a second:
https://www.jamespaulwesley.org/Document_Files/Order_versus_Chaos_in_a_Steady-State_Cosmology.pdf
Those far-away galaxies are not impossible, according to the ancient imagery recognised by the Webb telescope. Therefore, there is something impossible in our modelling of the universe. The fundamental impossibility would appear to have been the sudden appearance of our universe from whatever nothing might have been before something appeared. Assuming Hubble’s interpretation of the red-shift is correct and the speed of light has been constant throughout the last 13.8 billion years, then at some point in time the expansion of the universe is going to see galaxies separating from each other at the speed of light, which theoretically cannot be surpassed, which has some interesting philosophical, if not mathematical, implications involving an event horizon enclosing our universe.
You are right. Our current understanding of the expansion of the universe implies that deep in the future galaxies will separate from us at a speed greater than the speed of light, and so we won’t be able to see them. The sky will become ever so darker.
However, there doesn’t seem to be any philosophical or mathematical problems with it. Is there?
We might already be in such a regime. It is possible that some galaxies are already out of our ‘observable’ universe.
And as a rider to the above, if our observatories were closer than they are to that event horizon, say 1 billion light years from it rather than umpteen billion light yearss from it, what would they see? Exactly the same picture, with impossible galaxies 13.8 billion away from us. Which, according to the type of argument expressed by Zeno, would indicate that the universe is utterly infinite.
And God said “let there be light”!
6000 years old. Set in position by God as described in the Bible.
“Science” is a false religion at this point.