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COSMOS-Web Maps the Cosmic Web Back to 1 Billion Years Old
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JWST's COSMOS-Web survey has produced the first clear map of the universe's large-scale structure stretching back to when the cosmos was just one billion years old — charting 164,000 galaxies across dark matter filaments. It's not a refinement of what we had; it's a fundamentally different category of clarity.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
For the first time, astronomers have a clear map of the universe's large-scale hidden structure stretching back to when the universe was just one billion years old. That's the result of the COSMOS-Web survey, built from James Webb Space Telescope observations of one hundred and sixty-four thousand galaxies.
Here's what makes this significant. When researchers compared the new JWST data against Hubble images of the same sky region, structures that Hubble blurred into single features resolved into multiple distinct components.
COSMOS-Web is the largest General Observer program selected for JWST. The sky coverage is equivalent to three full Moons.
The important distinction is what this map confirms versus what it still can't fully resolve. The universe at one billion years old was dramatically different from today.
What this changes, practically, is the quality of the test we can now run against cosmological models. Galaxy evolution theory has long predicted how structures should form along dark matter filaments.
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