Online catalog gives open science access to data from early universe

A NASA-backed project using observations from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has released more than 1.5 TB of data for open science, offering the largest view deep into the universe available to date.

The Cosmic Evolution Survey (COSMOS), a joint project from the University of California, Santa Barbara and Rochester Institute of Technology, has launched a searchable dataset for budding astrophysics enthusiasts worldwide.

As well as a catalog of galaxies, the dataset includes an interactive viewer that users can search for images of specific objects or click them to view their properties, covering approximately 0.54 square degrees of sky with the Near Infrared Camera (NIRCam) and a 0.2 square degree area with the Mid Infrared Instrument (MIRI).

Although the raw data was already publicly available to the science community, the aim of the COSMOS-Web project was to make it more usable for other scientists.

"Those raw ...