Multinational project obtains a catalog of almost 800,000 galaxies

▲ Images of galaxies from almost 800,000 years ago, from top left to bottom right: the present-day universe and 3, 4, 8, 9, and 10 billion years ago. Photo Cosmos-Web

Europa Press

La Jornada Newspaper, Tuesday, June 10, 2025, p. 6

Madrid. The multinational scientific collaboration Cosmos (Cosmic Evolutionary Survey) has published the data that support the largest map of the universe: a catalog of nearly 800,000 galaxies spanning almost all of cosmic time.

Called the Cosmos-Web field, the project, created with data collected by the James Webb Space Telescope ( JWST ), challenges existing notions about the early universe.

Our goal was to build this deep space field at a physical scale that far exceeds anything done before , said Caitlin Casey, a professor of physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara, who co-leads the Cosmos-Web collaboration with Jeyhan Kartaltepe of the Rochester Institute of Technology, in a statement.

“If we had a printout of the Hubble Ultra Deep Field on a standard piece of paper,” he said, referring to the iconic view of nearly 10,000 galaxies released by NASA in 2004, our image would be slightly larger than a 4-by-4-meter-wide mural, at the same depth. So it’s truly impressive .

The Cosmos-Web composite image goes back about 13.5 billion years; according to NASA, the universe is about 13.8 billion years old, with a gap of 100 million years. This covers approximately 98 percent of all cosmic time.

The researchers' goal was not only to observe some of the most interesting galaxies from the beginning of time, but also to gain a broader view of the cosmic environments that existed during the early universe, during the formation of the first stars, galaxies, and black holes.

The cosmos is organized into dense regions and voids , Casey explained. We wanted to go beyond finding the most distant galaxies; we wanted to get that broader context of where they lived .

Before JWST was activated, Casey said, she and her fellow astronomers made their best predictions about how many more galaxies the space telescope would be able to see, given its 6.5-meter-diameter light-collecting primary mirror—about six times larger than Hubble ’s 2.4-meter mirror. Hubble ’s best measurements suggested that galaxies within the first 500 million years would be incredibly rare, she said.

It makes sense: the Big Bang happens, and it takes time for things to gravitationally collapse and form, and for stars to become active. There's a timescale associated with that , Casey explained.

The big surprise is that with JWST , we're seeing about 10 times more galaxies than expected at these incredible distances. We're also seeing supermassive black holes that aren't even visible with Hubble . And not only are they seeing more, but they're seeing different types of galaxies and black holes, he added.

While the Cosmos-Web images and catalog answer many questions astronomers have had about the early universe, they also raise new ones.

“Ever since the telescope was launched, we’ve wondered: Are these JWST data sets breaking the cosmological model? Because the universe was producing too much light too early; it only had about 400 million years to form stars with a mass equivalent to a billion solar stars. We just don’t know how to do it,” Casey said. So there are details to unravel and many unanswered questions .

▲ An analysis of data from 11 reserves in South Africa between 2017 and 2023 showed a 78 percent decrease in the capture of these endangered animals. Photo: AFP

Europa Press

La Jornada Newspaper, Tuesday, June 10, 2025, p. 6

Madrid. Rhino dehorning results in a drastic reduction in poaching of these endangered animals, according to an analysis of data from 11 reserves in South Africa between 2017 and 2023.

Poaching for rhino horn represents a serious threat to the world's five rhinoceros species. Other measures against this scourge are ineffective, according to the study.

Lead author Tim Kuiper of Nelson Mandela University said in a statement: “We documented the poaching of 1,985 rhinos (approximately 6.5 percent of the annual population) across 11 Greater Kruger reserves over seven years. This landscape is a crucial global stronghold that conserves around 25 percent of all rhinos in Africa.

Dehorning rhinos to reduce poaching incentives (2,284 rhinos were dehorned across eight reserves) achieved a 78 percent reduction in poaching using just 1.2 percent of the total rhino protection budget . This was based on comparisons between sites with and without dehorning, as well as changes in poaching before and after dehorning.

However, the study showed that poaching of dehorned rhinos for stumps and shoots continued, while more recent evidence (2024-2025) since the study concluded in 2023 suggests this is a growing problem. Dehorning could also divert poachers' attention to horned rhino populations in other areas.

The reserves studied invested $74 million in anti-poaching interventions between 2017 and 2021. The majority of the investment focused on reactive security measures (rangers, sniffer dogs, helicopters, access controls, and detection cameras), which led to the arrest of more than 700 poachers.

However, the authors found no statistical evidence that these interventions significantly reduced poaching. Interventions that facilitate the detection and arrest of poachers, while a necessary element of anti-poaching tools, are compromised by systemic factors, such as local poverty (which drives people to take risks) and corruption (which provides a way to circumvent interventions, as this recent and compelling report highlights).