Pandora's Cluster Cushion

Astronomers estimate 50,000 sources of near-infrared light are represented in this image from the James Webb Space Telescope. Their light has travelled through varying distances to reach the telescope's detectors, representing the vastness of space in a single image. A foreground star in our own galaxy, to the right of the image centre, displays Webb's distinctive diffraction spikes. Bright white sources surrounded by a hazy glow are the galaxies of Pandora's Cluster, a conglomeration of already-massive clusters of galaxies coming together to form a megacluster. The concentration of mass is so great that the fabric of spacetime is warped by gravity, creating an effect that makes the region of special interest to astronomers: a natural, super-magnifying glass called a gravitational lens that they can use to see very distant sources of light beyond the cluster. These lensed sources appear red in the image, and often as elongated arcs distorted by the gravitational lens. Many of these are galaxies from the early universe, with their contents magnified and stretched out for astronomers to study.