NASANASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has captured the first image of what our galaxy might look like as it was forming — and it’s got space scientists feeling very Christmassy.
“I just love this bright galaxy with its Christmas lights shining like the universe was only 600 million years old,” Professor Catherine Hymans, Astronomer Royal for Scotland, told BBC News.
The image shows ten balls of different colored stars, like Christmas tree baubles hanging in the cosmos.
It’s the first time scientists have observed the star clusters that make up galaxies like our own Milky Way and hold clues to how the universe was formed.
Scientists have named the distant galaxy the Firefly Sparkle, because it also looks like a swarm of multi-colored fireflies.
From its orbit in space, unhindered by Earth’s atmosphere, the most powerful telescope ever has already shown us. More distant and therefore older galaxies, But not in the early stages of formation like ours, nor in so much detail.
“The data on what happened at this stage of the universe is very sparse,” according to Dr. Lamia Mola of Wellesley College in Massachusetts, who co-led the research.
“But here, we’re actually looking at a galaxy as it’s being built brick by brick. The galaxies we normally see around us are already formed, so this is the first time we’ve seen this process.” He told BBC News.
NASAProfessor Hymans, the Astronomer Royal for Scotland, who is independent of the research team, described the discovery as “beautiful, scientifically significant and very festive”.
“I find it amazing that humans have built a telescope that allows us to peer so far back in time that we can see these early stages of the galaxy in such a beautiful way.”
According to Dr. Mola, star clusters are of different colors because they are at different stages of their formation.
“It’s very beautiful because the early life of the galaxy is very active,” he said.
“There’s a lot going on, new stars are being formed, massive stars are dying, there’s a lot of gas and dust around it and nitrogen and oxygen and the state they’re in, you It has beautiful colors.
“We are able to tell something about the age of each cluster, the composition of their elements and the temperature.”
When Dr. Mola reached across the galaxy, he had never seen such bright and colorful star clusters. This convinced him that something was different about the system, so he checked how far away it was.
To his surprise it turned out to be more than 13 billion light years away.
The light from the firefly sparkle dates back to some time after the creation of the universe and thus 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, if it weren’t for a very lucky cosmic coincidence.
Right between the Firefly Sparkle and JWST was a cluster of galaxies, which distorts space-time to diffuse light from a distant galaxy, effectively acting as a giant magnifying glass.
Astronomers call this process gravitational lensing, which in this instance enabled research co-leader Dr. Karthik Iyer of Columbia University in New York and other team members to see for the first time in incredible detail the first galaxies like ours. Made his own Milky Way.
“It takes the light coming from the firefly and bends it and magnifies it so we can see it in amazing detail,” he told BBC News.
“Our reconstruction shows that clusters of actively forming stars are surrounded by light scattered from other stars. This galaxy is literally in the process of being assembled.”
“When it all does and we’re able to see this incredible distant galaxy, it’s a very humbling, magical feeling.”