Tag: galaxies
James Webb captures a stunning colliding pair of galaxies
NASA’s Webb may have just seen 2 galaxies merging in the early universe
A long time ago, astronomer Dan Coe discovered a galaxy far, far away… so far, it was considered to be perhaps the most distant in the universe.
Little did he know that what he saw with the Hubble Space Telescope then, MACS0647-JD, might actually be two galaxies instead of one.
Cue a cymbal crash and a John Williams musical score. Crawl, crawl, crawl…
The revelation that Coe’s space object might actually be two galaxies merging together is yet another new finding in the James Webb Space Telescope saga, Hubble’s infrared successor. In a new blog post from NASA, the European Space Agency, and the Space Telescope Science Institute, Coe describes the difference the new observatory has made: What appeared as a pale red dot 10 years ago — a tiny galaxy a fraction of the size of the Milky Way in the first 400 million years after the big bang — has a little blue companion. Now scientists are discussing what it means.
“If this is the most distant merger, I will be really ecstatic!” said Tiger Yu-Yang Hsiao, an astronomer at Johns Hopkins University, in the NASA blog.
“If this is the most distant merger, I will be really ecstatic!”
Credit: NASA / ESA / STScI
The purpose of the $10 billion Webb telescope is to help scientists understand how the first stars and galaxies formed in the universe, estimated to be 13.8 billion years old. In astronomy, looking farther translates into observing the past because light and other forms of radiation must travel incredible distances to reach us. Light gets stretched into the infrared, which human eyes can’t see but Webb’s highly sensitive mirrors can detect. Scientists then translate the data into colors.
A phenomenon known as gravitational lensing helped Webb reveal more information about MACS0647-JD. The massive gravity of a cluster of galaxies in the foreground acted as a cosmic lens, bending and magnifying light from the distant system. Not only did this effect make MACS0647-JD more visible, but it scattered copies of the system at different scales in three parts of the image, according to NASA.
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Prior to Webb, scientists only knew of a handful of galaxies in the early period of the universe, said Rebecca Larson, an astronomer at the University of Texas in Austin who is part of the research team.
But “Studying them can help us understand how they evolved into the ones like the galaxy we live in today,” she said in the blog.
Researchers said the blue gas in the image indicates very young star formation and little dust, while the red is dustier and older. Scientists plan to probe deeper to determine whether these are two galaxies or two clumps of stars within one galaxy.
“This is not a long exposure,” Larson said. “We haven’t even really tried to use this telescope to look at one spot for a long time.”
NASA’s James Webb Telescope Captures Extreme View of Galaxies Merging – CNET
NASA’s Webb Telescope Spots Galaxies Merging Around ‘Monster’ Black Hole – CNET
James Webb telescope captures ‘knot’ of galaxies in the early universe
The James Webb Space Telescope has produced its second revelatory image in as many days. Scientists using the observatory have discovered a tightly-packed “knot” of at least three galaxies that were forming around a quasar 11.5 billion years ago, just over 2 billion years after the Big Bang. The telescope’s near-infrared spectrograph not only showed that the galaxies were orbiting each other at high speeds (up to 435 miles per second), but that this one of the most dense known areas of early galaxy formation. The density is unusually high enough that lead researcher Dominika Wylezalek suggested there may even be two “halos” of dark matter merging in this area.
The quasar itself is unusual. The not-so-elegantly-named SDSS J165202.64+172852.3 is a very red example that doesn’t emit as wide a variety of light as already-rare ‘normal’ quasars. These objects serve as active galactic nuclei and are powered by the gas tumbling into a supermassive black hole at the core of their galaxies.
The imagery also underscores the strength of the Webb telescope’s sensors. Earlier studies using the Hubble and Gemini-North telescopes spotted the quasar’s outflows, but didn’t reveal more than one host galaxy.
More study is necessary to determine how galaxy clusters like this take form and are affected by supermassive black holes. However, the Webb findings already promise to improve humanity’s understanding of how the present-day web of galaxies came to be, not to mention how quasars might stifle star formation through their flows.
This is also just the start of Webb-based quasar discoveries. The team noted that Hubble data suggests there may be still more galaxies twirling around the quasar. This is also the first part of a trilogy of studies using Webb to analyze quasars at multiple points in the universe’s history. These efforts could shed considerably more light on cosmic evolution in the years ahead.