In the first image NASA released from the Webb telescope, some galaxies look like strings of stretched taffy.
That's because the universe itself has altered our view of the deep cosmos.
Astronomers recently pointed the colossal James Webb Space Telescope at a cluster of galaxies dubbed SMACS 0723. Crucially, galaxies are enormously massive objects as they contain hundreds of billions of stars, millions of black holes, and perhaps trillions of planets. The combined mass of these galaxies warps space, like a bowling ball sitting on a mattress.
This warped space essentially creates a "lens" that we look through. So the light from the galaxies behind this galactic cluster that we (or the Webb telescope) ultimately see is distorted. It's an occurrence called "gravitational lensing." As the Space Telescope Science Institute (which runs the telescope) explains: "It's like having a camera lens in between us and the more distant galaxies."
Albert Einstein predicted the effect of gravitational lensing over a century ago. Some of the galaxies we can view below in Webb's first deep view into the cosmos, then, are magnified, and some are profoundly stretched or distorted.
"They've been magnified by the gravity of the cluster, just like Einstein said they would," NASA astrophysicist Jane Rigby said at the reveal of Webb's first scientific images.
In the image above, the cluster of white-looking, ethereal galaxies are some 4.6 billion years old. They formed around the same time as the sun and Earth, Rigby said. It's these white galaxies that magnify and alter the view behind.
These more distant objects, which include both the red dots and bizarrely-distorted galaxies, are among the oldest objects in the cosmos. "All the super faint, dark-red tiny dots, as well as many of the brighter, strangely shaped objects in this astounding image are extremely distant galaxies that no human eye has seen before," Harald Ebeling, an astronomer at the University of Hawaii Institute for astronomy, said in a statement.
The faintest objects in this Webb image are some 13.1 billion years old, Rigby said. Yet Webb will soon look even farther into the past, over 13.5 billion years ago, soon after the first stars and galaxies formed