![]() ![]() This stretching, or " redshift," causes the light to move down toward the "red end" of the electromagnetic spectrum. ![]() This is a result of the expansion of the universe stretching the wavelengths of light leaving these clusters as they travel for billions of years to reach Earth. Until the December 2021 launch of JWST, astronomers had difficulty investigating how galactic clusters like the Coma Cluster came together in the infant universe. "We can see these distant galaxies like small drops of water in different rivers, and we can see that eventually they will all become part of one big, mighty river," team member Benedetta Vulcani, of the National Institute of Astrophysics in Italy, said in the same statement. They predicted the protocluster will resemble the Coma Cluster, meaning it could now be one of the densest clusters of galaxies in the cosmos with thousands of individual member galaxies. The NIRSpec data allowed the team to model how the galaxy group develops over time and build a picture of what this cluster should look like in the modern universe. The key to doing this and to determining the distances between the galaxies were precise measurements captured by Webb's Near-Infrared Spectrograph (NIRSpec). ![]() The team was able to determine that the galaxies are moving at over 2 million mph (3.2 million kph), about 1,000 times faster than a bullet fired by a rifle, through a halo of dark matter. (Image credit: Image: NASA, ESA, CSA, Takahiro Morishita (IPAC) Processing: Alyssa Pagan (STScI)) The seven galaxies highlighted in this James Webb Space Telescope image have been confirmed to be at a distance that astronomers refer to as redshift 7.9, which correlates to 650 million years after the Big Bang. ![]()
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