Webb Telescope Spots Distant Spiral Galaxy Like Ours

LEDA 2046648 looks suspiciously like our own Milky Way galaxy, but is a billion light years away.

In the unfathomable darkness and time that is the universe, each star is an omen of hope, a promise of life and shelter, like the lights of a distant ship on a cold sea.

So, courtesy of the James Webb Space Telescope, here's another reminder of nature's fecundity and bounty: thousands of galaxies, billions of stars and countless planets, a limitless realm of possibilities that dates back 13 years. billions of years in a small part of the sky in the constellation of Hercules.

At the bottom center is a spiral galaxy known as LEDA 2046648. It looks like a lookalike of the great galaxy in Andromeda, M31, or its twin, our own Milky Way galaxy — except the LEDA galaxy is a billion light-years away.

O A billion years ago, when the light in this image was emitted, the first multicellular organisms had appeared on Earth and were groping their way up the evolutionary ladder to plants, fish , dinosaurs, humans and everything that came after.

One ​​of the main missions of the Webb Telescope is to explore the age when the first stars and galaxies began to illuminate the universe. The Webb's secret sauce is its ability to detect infrared rays, or electromagnetic radiation of wavelengths longer than visible light which is therefore invisible to the human eye. As the universe expands, objects billions of light-years away are moving away from Earth so quickly that their light is "red-shifted" to longer infrared wavelengths, which the telescope Webb can see.

The universe as we think we know it came into being with the Big Bang about 13.8 billion years ago. Almost all of the objects in this image are distant galaxies; the few stars among them are distinguished by their six-pointed diffraction spikes. Some of the background blobs are thought to date from as little as 300 million years after the beginning of the cosmos.

The study of these early galaxies, astronomers say should help clarify what sorts of stars first condensed from the Big Bang and how supermassive black holes came to occupy the centers of nearly every galaxy today. Preliminary results of these investigations have already surprised scientists by suggesting that there may be more early galaxies and massive black holes than predicted by traditional models of cosmic origin.

This image of the LEDA galaxy was obtained on May 22, 2022, while astronomers linked to the European Space Agency were testing the telescope's working camera, Near Infrared Camera, or NIRCam; ESA has partnered with NASA and the Canadian Space Agency to build and operate the telescope. On January 31, ESA released the image as Photo of the Month.

Looking at this snapshot from eternity, it's hard not to wondering if it's microbes or something else were doing a similar test in LEDA 2046648 or one of the other bright spots in the picture, and if we'll ever know.