This website contains a series of "fly-through" videos of the JWST COSMOS field. These were produced during the summmer of 2024 by Oliver Stewart, Durham University, on a Collingwood College Alumni funded internship, using images from the James Webb Space Telescope.
I would like to thank Prof. Mark Swinbank, Dr. James Trayford, Dr. Chris Harrison, the JWST consortium and Collingwood College for this opportunity.
Videos were made using deep field images from the PRIMER survey, exploiting the unique near-mid IR imaging capabilities of JWST.
Approximately 80,000 galaxies wre identified in the JWST image. Spatial positions in cartesian coordinates (XYZ) were calculated from right ascension (RA), declination (Dec), and photometric redshift. Partiview enabled a 3D visualisation of this data to 'fly' through, highlighting the depth and abundance of galaxies in a small and random region of the sky.
To improve inclusivity, a recently developed sonification technique was employed to create sounds for each galaxy using their unique energy spectra. For each galaxy, a spectrum was created given its mass, star formation rate, metallicity and age. For each camera position, these are then weighted and summed (based on distance), and converted to audio based on the optical to mid-IR spectrum. This audio was generated with the STRAUSS code, was then embedded into the fly-through, with the aim to allow blind and visually impaired people to 'hear' the universe as 'seen' through the world's premiere telescope.
All videos have been made available to the public for the purpose of education, outreach, and/or to be used in planetarium shows.
Partiview Digital Universe
Strauss
PRIMER (Public Release IMaging for Extragalactic Research) is a major public Treasury Program designed to provide the astronomical community with an early, large-area, homogenous, deep JWST NIRCam+MIRI imaging survey of enormous power and legacy value (PI: Jim Dunlop, Edinburgh). The PRIMER webpage contains detailed information about the survey and data releases.
Redshifts and spectral properties were provided courtsey of the DAWN JWST Archive DJA is an initiative of the Cosmic Dawn Center (DAWN), which is funded by the Danish National Research Foundation under grant DNRF140.