Light from the Universe’s First Stars Captured
400 million years after the Big Bang, the James Webb Space Telescope noticed a bright spot near the galaxy GN-z11 — like a distant lighthouse whose light pushed through the primordial darkness.
The Smallest Cosmic Lens
Light from a distant quasar, the bright core of a galaxy, passes by a massive galaxy and bends, like a flashlight beam through uneven glass. If the lens and source align almost perfectly, we see not one quasar but several copies.
Archipelago in the Ocean of Data: Red Points Without Color Boundaries
Two hundred forty-two thousand three hundred twenty-seven galaxies — like grains of sand on a beach. But astronomers turned this chaos into a map: the UMAP algorithm (a machine learning method) took from each galaxy eleven parameters — seven colors from optical to mid-infrared (that's photometry), magnitude…