Massimo Pascale wasn’t planning to study the galaxy cluster SMACS 0723. But as soon as he saw the cluster glittering in the first image from the James Webb Space Telescope, or JWST, he and his colleagues couldn’t help themselves.
“We were like, we have to do something,” says Pascale, an astronomer at the University of California, Berkeley. “We can’t stop ourselves from analyzing this data. It was so exciting.”
Pascale’s team is one of several groups of scientists who saw the first JWST images and immediately rolled up their sleeves. In the first few days after images and the data used to create them were made public, scientists have estimated the amount of mass the cluster contains, uncovered a violent incident in the cluster’s recent past and estimated the ages of the stars in galaxies far beyond the cluster itself.
“We’ve been preparing for this for a long time. Myself, I’ve been preparing for years, and I’m not very old,” says Pascale, who is in his fourth year of graduate school. JWST “is really going to define a new generation of astronomers and a new generation of science as a whole.”
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