A UC Santa Barbara professor helped create the largest map of the universe ever made. The interactive map, spanning almost the entire history of the universe, was released to the public on Thursday.
The NASA-funded COSMOS-Web project used the James Webb Space Telescope to capture nearly 800,000 galaxies.
It is one of the most ambitious deep-space maps ever created– about 200 times larger than the famous Hubble Ultra-Deep Field. The James Webb Telescope can see fainter and more distant objects than Hubble.
UCSB Physics Professor Caitlin Casey is one of the lead astronomers on the project. Casey said the team was surprised to find hundreds of thousands of galaxies so far away.
“As we look to more and more distant objects, we're looking farther back in time, and we can do this even to times when the universe was very young– only two to three percent of its current age, " Casey said. “By finding galaxies that exist at those extraordinary distances, we are demonstrating that, yes, stars have turned on. There are so many of them already established at that really early time.”
According to Casey, scientists are still trying to understand how the universe produced so much light so quickly after the Big Bang.
Casey and the research team prioritized making the COSMOS-Web project data public so that other scientists– and even undergraduates– without NASA access can contribute to this research.
