Figure 1: Revealing the Nature of the Ultra-Faint Galaxy LAP1-B through a Giant "Gravitational Lens" (IMAGE)

Kanazawa University

Figure 1: Revealing the Nature of the Ultra-Faint Galaxy LAP1-B through a Giant "Gravitational Lens"

Caption

(Background) An image of the massive galaxy cluster MACS J0416, captured by the James Webb Space Telescope's (JWST) Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam).

(Inset) A three-color composite image of LAP1-B in "velocity space," created from JWST Near-Infrared Spectrograph (NIRSpec) data. Because this galaxy contains very few stars and is extremely faint, it is invisible in the standard background camera image (NIRCam). However, high-sensitivity spectroscopic observations successfully captured the faint light (emission lines) emitted by hydrogen and oxygen gas. In this inset, the horizontal axis represents the motion (velocity) of the gas, while the vertical axis shows its spatial extent, visualizing the distribution of different elements (Blue: Hydrogen Lyα; Green: Oxygen [OIII]; Red: Hydrogen Hα). For visual clarity in comparing the element distributions, the Lyα emission is shown with a velocity offset of 200 km/s.

 

Credit

© NASA, ESA, CSA & K. Nakajima et al., Nature.

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