NASA’s Webb Telescope Decided to Peek Inside This Intergalactic Pandora’s Box

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NASA, ESA, CSA, I. Labbe (Swinburne University of Technology) and R. Bezanson (University of Pittsburgh). Image processing: Alyssa Pagan (STScI)

Feast your eyes on a cosmic Pandora’s box, courtesy NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope. The next-gen instrument has already shown us a glimpse of space unlike anything we’ve ever seen before—and the hits just keep coming. On Wednesday, the agency released a new image taken by Webb of Pandora’s Cluster.

It’s not a stretch to say that looking into Pandora’s Cluster is akin to peering into Pandora’s box. This region of space comprises four separate galaxy clusters that piled up over the span of 350 million years to merge into a single mega-cluster, about 4 billion light-years from Earth.

The new image shows off three of those four individual galaxy clusters. If you look closely, some of the light emanating from the individual galaxies seems to be bending—a sign of the strong gravitational interactions at play between the massive objects.