Astronomers have made a startling discovery using the very first image captured in full color by the new super-telescope James Webb.
The photograph, which was presented to the world by Vice President Joe Biden in July, depicts a view of the universe billions of years in the past.
Researchers have identified what they believe to be the most distant globular clusters ever discovered in this breathtaking panorama.
James Webb telescope captured shiny object
In addition, these stars are generally quite ancient and relatively pristine: they contain fewer of the heavier chemical elements that pollute more recent stars such as the Sun, Our Milky Way Galaxy, in which the Sun resides, is surrounded by more than a hundred of these compact groupings, but their formation remains a mystery, the image of Biden Webb should enhance our comprehension.
The image SMACS 0723 is an illustration of what is known as a gravitational lens. It depicts a collection of massive foreground galaxies that have magnified and bent the light from background galaxies.
Moreover, astronomers at the University of Toronto have noticed a particularly beautiful galaxy in the far distance. It has been dubbed the “Sparkler Galaxy” because it is surrounded by tiny yellow-red dots, or “sparkles.”
Only with the extraordinary power of James Webb can these dots be resolved. The other great observatory, Hubble, for example, was unable to detect them.
The Toronto team initially questioned whether or not the sparkles were connected to the Sparkler Galaxy. Was it possible that they were sitting alone a considerable distance in front of or behind the Sparkler? The Sparkler Galaxy appears three times in the SMACS 0723 image, indicating that it is associated with the other objects.
In some instances, gravitational lenses can not only magnify background objects, but also distort and multiply their appearance & moreover, the same dots are present in all three versions of the Sparkler Galaxy.
The team hypothesized that the sparkles are identical to the globular clusters observed around the Milky Way today, except that we are observing these dots much, much earlier in the history of the universe.
We observe the Sparkler as it appeared approximately 4.5 billion years after the Big Bang, nine billion years in the past, Dr. Lamiya Mowla from Toronto’s Dunlap Institute of Astronomy & Astrophysics explained, “These globular clusters are incredibly massive.” “We also find them to be quite ancient.
“They could have formed in a burst roughly 10 billion years ago, at the peak of star formation, which we refer to as “cosmic noon.” However, their color is incorrect. “For something to be relatively young, it must be bluer, but we’ve discovered that they’re much redder than we anticipated, which means they must be older, even at such an early age,”
she said.
The team hypothesized that the stars in these globular sparkles formed within a few hundred million years of the Big Bang. According to the astronomers, it is even possible that the sparkles contain some of the first stars ever to form in the universe.
“Are they the Holy Grail?” asked Dr. Mowla.
“Everyone is searching for those stars, and when we first opened the SMACS image, we, too, were looking for the most distant objects, the most distant things. Then we were literally distracted by the most dazzling object.”
The Canadian NIRISS Unbiased Cluster Survey (CANUCS) at the University of Toronto will now examine five more gravitationally lensed views from James Webb similar to its SMACS image.
Dr. Kartheik Iyer, a postdoctoral fellow at the Dunlap Institute, remarked, “This will significantly increase the number of galaxies with a halo around them.”
“We want to know how prevalent these glitters are. He asked , “Did we just discover a unique galaxy, or is this something we can expect to see more of when we have a representative sample from Webb?”
The research conducted by the Toronto Sparkler is published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.
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