The James Webb Space Telescope continues to send us remarkable images and information.  I was struck by this beautiful image showing a huge cluster of galaxies about 5 billion light-years away. (That means the light we see here left those galaxies 5 billion years ago, when the Sun and the Earth were just being born in our Galaxy.)  Yet look how clear and sharp the image is.  The bright stars with spikes are stars in our own Milky Way Galaxy which happen to lie in the same direction.   Everything else in the picture is a galaxy of millions or billions of stars.

Notice that some galaxies are larger and easier to make out, while others are smaller or further away.  Among the bigger images, you can distinguish some bluish-white galaxies that show spiral structure, similar to our Milky Way, and some yellowish, round galaxies that have the characteristic elliptical shape of galaxies with little internal structure.  But just let your eyes taken in the sheer number of different galaxies, and imagine the even vaster number of stars and planets which they contain.

The entire cluster contains at least 300 individual galaxies, and astronomers estimate that there may be a several hundred more galaxies in the same direction that are possible members. Their combined gravity is enough to warp space in the neighborhood and therefore to bend any light coming from galaxies behind them, something we call gravitational lensing. (This was predicted by Einstein from his general theory of relativity, and already found in many Hubble images.)  Astronomers can see several elongated and misshape structures in the image that are lensed background galaxies.

This cluster is too remote to have a name, but is denoted by its ugly catalog number  MACS J1149.  Still, isn’t it a gorgeous picture?