Another view ...
... A NASA-backed project using observations from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has released more than 1.5 TB of data for open science, offering the largest view deep into the universe available to date.
The Cosmic Evolution Survey (COSMOS), a joint project from the University of California, Santa Barbara and Rochester Institute of Technology, has launched a searchable dataset for budding astrophysics enthusiasts worldwide.
As well as a catalog of galaxies, the dataset includes an interactive viewer that users can search for images of specific objects or click them to view their properties, covering approximately 0.54 square degrees of sky with the Near Infrared Camera (NIRCam) and a 0.2 square degree area with the Mid Infrared Instrument (MIRI).
Although the raw data was already publicly available to the science community, the aim of the COSMOS-Web project was to make it more usable for other scientists.
"Those raw data are public, but it takes a lot of work to do all of the calibrations and correct for all of the different types of artifacts that you can get in the imaging... such as the background light, so that you end up with a final image that's clean and usable for science," said Jeyhan Kartaltepe, associate professor at Rochester Institute of Technology and lead researcher of COSMOS-Web.
Artifacts are elements of the images that don't come from an astrophysical source, such as "snowball" ghost images caused by light from bright stars bouncing around the JWST.
One of about 100 projects each year to gain time on the $10 billion JWST, COSMOS-Web aims to observe very high redshift galaxies in a relatively large region of sky.
"So many surveys observe a very small area or an intermediate area, but there's a trade-off: you can either look in one spot and stare for a really long time and see the deepest things possible, or you can try to cover a large area. COSMOS doesn't observe quite as deeply to see the faintest things possible, but it does cover a large area, which lets us cover a very large cosmic volume. We still detect very high redshift galaxies, but we're able -- because of the size of the imaging -- to measure the scale of structures at high redshift," Kartaltepe said. ...
