NASA’s James Webb and Hubble space telescopes used their specialized instruments to capture an expansive, yet festive, image of galaxy cluster known as MACS0416 by combining visible as well as infrared light data. It’s been nicknamed the Christmas Tree Galaxy Cluster and located approximately 4.3 billion light-years from Earth.
By combining both Webb and Hubble space telescopes, astronomers were able to discover a multitude of galaxies outside the cluster and a sprinkling of sources that vary over time, possibly due to gravitational lensing. What do the colors mean? The bluest galaxies you see relatively nearby, while the redder ones more distant as detected by Webb.
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We’re calling MACS0416 the Christmas Tree Galaxy Cluster, both because it’s so colorful and because of these flickering lights we find within it. We can see transients everywhere,” said Haojing Yan, lead author of one paper describing the scientific results.
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