‘Christmas lights’ galaxy reveals how the universe formed
NASANASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has for the first time captured an image of our galaxy as it looked when it was forming — and it’s making space scientists feel very Christmassy.
“I love the Milky Way lit up with Christmas lights, as it was when the universe was just 600 million years old,” Professor Katherine Heymans, Astronomer Royal for Scotland, told BBC News.
The image shows ten balls of stars of different colors, which appear like Christmas tree baubles hanging in the universe.
It is the first time that scientists have seen a cluster of stars forming a galaxy like our own and provides clues about how the universe formed.
Scientists have named the distant galaxy Firefly Sparkle because it also looks like a swarm of multicolored fireflies.
From its orbit in space unobstructed by Earth’s atmosphere, the most powerful telescope ever built has already shown us More distant and therefore older galaxies, But none like us in this early stage of formation and not in such detail.
According to Dr. Lamia Mowla of Wellesley College, Massachusetts, who co-led the research, “Data on what happened at this stage of the universe is very scarce.”
“But here, we’re actually watching a galaxy as it’s being built brick by brick. The galaxies we normally see around us have already formed, so this is the first time we’ve seen this process,” he told BBC News.
NASAProfessor Heymans, the Astronomer Royal for Scotland, who is independent from the research team, described the discovery as “grand, scientifically significant and hugely celebratory”.
“I find it amazing that humans have created a telescope that allows us to look so far back in time and that we can see these nascent phases of the galaxy in such a beautifully celebratory way.”
According to Dr. Mowla, star clusters are of different colors because they are in different stages of their formation.
“It’s very beautiful because the early life of the galaxy is extremely active,” she said.
“There’s a lot happening, new stars are being born, massive stars are dying, there’s a lot of gas and dust around it and nitrogen and oxygen and because of the state they’re in, you have these lovely colors. Are .
“We are able to tell something about the age of each cluster, the composition of their elements and the temperature at which they formed.”
When Dr. Mowla came across the galaxy, she had never seen such a bright and colorful cluster of stars before. This led him to believe that there was something different about this system, so he checked how far away it was.
To his surprise, it was more than 13 billion light years away.
The light from the firefly sparkles dates back to shortly after the creation of the universe and so has taken more than 13 billion years to reach us. It is so small and so far away that even JWST would not have been able to see it, unless for an extremely lucky cosmic coincidence.
Right between the Firefly Sparkle and the JWST was a cluster of galaxies that warped space-time to diffuse light from the distant galaxy and effectively acted as a giant magnifying glass.
Astronomers call this process gravitational lensing, which in this example enabled research co-lead Dr. Karthik Iyer of Columbia University in New York and other team members to see for the first time in incredible detail how the first galaxies were like ours. Our galaxy was formed.
“It takes the light coming from the firefly and bends it and amplifies it so we can see it in fantastic detail,” he told BBC News.
“Our reconstruction shows that clusters of actively forming stars are surrounded by diffuse light from other stars. This galaxy is literally in the process of coalescing.”
“When it does all this and we’re able to see this incredible distant galaxy, it’s a very humbling, magical feeling.”
This research has been published in Nature Journal.
