NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has captured for the first time an image of what our galaxy looked like during its formation, sparking Christmas cheer among space scientists.
Royal Astronomer of Scotland Prof. “I love this sparkling galaxy shining with Christmas lights when the universe was only 600 million years old,” Catherine Heymans told BBC News. he said.
The image shows ten star balls of different colors hanging in the cosmos, looking like Christmas tree decorations.
The first time scientists have witnessed clusters of stars coming together to form a galaxy similar to the Milky Way contains clues about how the Universe was formed.
Scientists named the distant galaxy Firefly Sparkle because it resembles a swarm of colorful fireflies.
From its orbit in space, unobstructed by Earth’s atmosphere, the most powerful telescope ever built showed us more distant and therefore older galaxies; But we have never seen a galaxy like ours that is in an early stage of formation and not as detailed as this one.
Dr. from Wellesley College in Massachusetts, who co-led the study. According to Lamiya Mowla, “Data about what is happening at this stage of the universe is very sparse.”
“But here we are actually watching a galaxy forming brick by brick. The galaxies we normally see around us have already formed, so this is the first time we’re seeing this process,” he told BBC News.
Independent of the research team, Royal Astronomer of Scotland Prof. Heymans called the discovery “spectacular, scientifically important and extremely festive.”
“I find it incredible that people have built a telescope that allows us to look so far into the past and see these new phases of the galaxy in such a beautiful and festive way.”
Dr. Mowla said the reason star clusters are different colors is because they are at different stages of formation.
“This is cool because the early life of a galaxy is extremely active,” he said.
“There’s so much going on, new stars are being born, massive stars are dying, there’s so much gas and dust around it, there’s nitrogen and oxygen, and you get these beautiful colors because of the state they’re in.
“We can say something about the age of each cluster, the composition of its elements and the temperatures at which they formed.”
Dr. When Mowla came to the galaxy, she had never seen such vibrant and colorful star clusters before. This led him to believe there was something different about this system, so he checked how far away it was.
Surprisingly, it turned out to be more than 13 billion light-years away.
The light from Firefly Sparkle has been around since not long after the creation of the Universe, which is why it took more than 13 billion years to reach us. It’s so small and so far away that even JWST wouldn’t be able to see it were it not for an extremely lucky cosmic coincidence.
There was exactly one galaxy cluster between Firefly Sparkle and JWST; This cluster distorted space-time to stretch the light coming from the distant galaxy, acting as a giant magnifying glass.
Astronomers call this process gravitational lensing, which led to the study’s co-leader, Dr. For the first time, Kartheik Iyer and other members of the team had the opportunity to see incredible details about how the first galaxies like the Milky Way formed.
“It takes the light coming from the firefly, bends it and amplifies it, so we can see it in magnificent detail,” the scientist told BBC News.
“Our reconstruction shows that actively forming star clusters are surrounded by scattered light from other stars. This galaxy is literally in the process of merging.”
“When you do all this and you can see this incredibly distant galaxy, it’s such a humbling, magical feeling.”
The research was published in the journal Nature.