Webb Captures a 167-Megapixel ‘Visual Feast’ of Galaxies

May 01, 2025

Jeremy Gray

$A deep space image showing countless distant galaxies, stars, and bright points of light scattered across a black background, with some stars displaying diffraction spikes.$

The latest James Webb Space Telescope “Picture of the Month” exemplifies the $10 billion telescope’s remarkable imaging capabilities. The photo shows cosmic objects ranging from stars inside the Milky Way to galaxies billions of light-years away.

Within this one deep field photo are thousands of galaxies, the largest concentration of which is visible near the center of Webb’s new image. The central cluster is an especially interesting one because the galaxies “glow with white-gold light,” as the European Space Agency (ESA) explains.

“We see this galaxy group as it appeared when the Universe was 6.5 billions years old, a little less than half the Universe’s current age,” the ESA continues.

“This image presents a visual feast of galaxies. Take a moment to examine the galactic buffet: you’ll see galaxies with delicate spiral arms or warped disks, galaxies with smooth, featureless faces, and even galaxies that are interacting or merging and have taken on an array of strange shapes,” the ESA says.

$A deep space image shows numerous galaxies and stars scattered across a dark background, with bright spots, glowing clusters, and some light diffraction creating starburst effects.$

As a quick refresher, a galaxy’s — or any cosmic object’s — distance from Earth or a space telescope like Webb is measured in light-years. A light-year is the distance that light travels in one year — or approximately 5.88 trillion miles (9.46 trillion kilometers). Now, take that practically inconceivable distance and consider that some light in Webb’s new photo traveled for over seven billion years. Since Webb can capture such faint light, it sees objects as they were long before the Earth even formed.

While the James Webb Space Telescope is an exceptional technological achievement and its instruments provide scientists with groundbreaking new data — and it takes beautiful photos — it is not the perfect tool for every astronomical job. Sometimes, other older telescopes have unique advantages that Webb doesn’t.

A field of distant galaxies and stars glows against the darkness of space, with a bright blue star and lens flare at the top right and several fuzzy, yellowish elliptical galaxies near the center. — This 100% crop provides a good sense of the scale of the image. The full-resolution version, available to download here, is nearly one gigabyte large and 167 megapixels.

Webb’s latest shot looks at the most massive group in what scientists call the COSMOS-Web field. COSMOS stands for “Cosmic Evolution Survey.” The survey relies upon several telescopes, including Webb, the Hubble Space Telescope, and the ESA’s XMM-Newton space observatory, which captures X-ray data.

Combining data of the COSMOS-Web field captured by Webb, Hubble, XMM-Newton, and the NASA Chandra X-ray observatory, scientists created a composite that shows deep space across many different wavelengths of light. The X-ray data, shown in purple, shows hot gas inside the galaxy group that would otherwise be invisible.

A dense cluster of stars and galaxies fills the image, with a large, faint, purple-hued cloud overlaying the center, depicting dark matter or cosmic gas in deep space.

Purple is not the only noteworthy color in either version of the new photo. The different colors of galaxies and stars reflect varying ages. Younger stars are bluer, while older ones are redder. As for galaxies, the redder it is, the more distant.

Through COSMOS-Web, scientists hope to identify galaxies that formed during the epoch of reionization, learn more about how the Universe’s most massive galaxies formed, and understand more about the relationship between the mass of a galaxy’s stars and its extended galactic halo.

Image credits: ESA/Webb, NASA & CSA, G. Gozaliasl, A. Koekemoer, M. Franco, and the COSMOS-Web team