New papers in the Astrophysical Journal and Astronomy & Astrophysics describe the latest findings by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope.

The largest, most powerful and complex telescope in space used gravitational lensing and infrared instruments to see objects Hubble never could.

Notable examples include “El Anzuelo" (the Fishhook) and “La Flaca" (the Thin One). The names describe ancient galaxies seen through a distorting magnifying glass consisting of gravity-bending space-time.

“Einstein predicted 100 years ago that gravity bends space, right?” asked Rogier Windhorst of ASU, one of six Webb Interdisciplinary Scientists worldwide. “Therefore, anything that travels through space does not travel along a straight line, but a curved path. This is also true for light.”

NASA, ESA, CSA.

Two of the most prominent features in the image include "The Thin One," highlighted in box A, and "The Fishhook," a red swoosh highlighted in box B. Both are lensed background galaxies. The insets at right show zoomed-in views of both objects.

Windhorst has been involved with Webb almost from its beginning and also was affiliated with the Hubble Space Telescope since before its launch. He compared making sense of such spaghettified objects, which lenses can cause to appear duplicated, to photographing a bunch of schoolkids in a mirror funhouse.

“If you have a sufficient number of school kids and a sufficient number of observations, you can figure out where exactly the glass mirrors are, and why somebody appears three or four times in the photograph you just took,” he said.

Bending the light from these ancient stellar objects is a galaxy cluster dubbed "El Gordo" (the Fat One), which weighs in at a few thousand-trillion times our sun’s mass.

“These are literally hundreds of galaxies, halfway back to the beginning of time, that are in two giant piles,” Windhorst said. “Think of it as downtown Minneapolis and St. Paul or something like that.”

El Gordo pulls back the curtain on objects from just over a billion years after the Big Bang.

NASA, ESA, CSA.

Three ultra-diffuse galaxies (leftovers of galaxy formation) in the El Gordo cluster observed with JWST.

Located 10.6 billion light years away, El Anzuelo was a spiral-ish galaxy spanning a mere 26,000 light-years — about one-fourth the size of the Milky Way. When Webb observed it, its star formation was already rapidly slowing.

“It’s already winding down its activity, so to speak,” Windhorst said. “It's not like our own galaxy that's still in full action.”

Besides galaxies, Webb spied the first-ever red giant star observed more than 1 billion light years from Earth.

“And it's just at the lucky location where it gets highly magnified, and it may stay there for a couple of months or a couple of years,” Windhorst said.

NASA, ESA, CSA.

Two of the most prominent features in the image include "The Thin One," located just below and left of the image center, and "The Fishhook," a red swoosh at upper right. Both are lensed background galaxies.

The team nicknamed the star Quyllur, after the Quechua word for “star.”

Many of the objects studied were tinted red by dust and red-shifted by the expansion of the universe. As a result, they were visible only thanks to Webb’s near- and mid-infrared cameras.

Windhorst said he wants people to see the Webb observatory and its results in the context of our path in the universe — our cosmic Circle of Life.

“Our star and our planets and also ourselves, we were born from the cosmic materials that were deposited there by previous stars,” he said. “We're lucky enough to live on a planet where life is viable, and we need to keep it that way.”

Note: The top image is a lensed view of the El Anzuelo galaxy becoming undistorted from Patrick Kamieneski (ASU), Jake Summers (ASU), Jordan C. J. D'Silva (UWA), Anton M.Koekemoer (STScI), Aaron Robotham (UWA), Rogier Windhorst (ASU).