NASANASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has captured for the first time an image of what our galaxy likely looked like as it was forming — making space scientists feel festive.
Professor Catherine Heymans, Astronomer Royal of Scotland, told BBC News: ‘I love the galaxy twinkling with Christmas lights that twinkle as they did when the universe was only 600 million years old.’
The image shows ten balls of stars of different colors, looking like Christmas tree ornaments hanging in the universe.
It is the first time scientists have witnessed clusters of stars coming together to form a galaxy like our Milky Way, and holds clues about how the universe was formed.
Scientists have named the distant galaxy Firefly Sparkle because it also looks like a swarm of multi-colored fireflies.
From its orbit in space, unobstructed by Earth’s atmosphere, it showed us the most powerful telescope ever built Galaxies are more distant and therefore older, But it is not like us in the early stages of formation and not with such details.
“There is very little data on what happened at this point in the universe,” said Dr. Lamia Al-Mawla from Wellesley College in Massachusetts, who co-led the research.
“But here, we’re actually watching one galaxy forming brick by brick. The galaxies we normally see around us have already formed, and this is the first time we’ve seen this process,” she told BBC News.
NASAProfessor Heymans, Royal Scottish Astronomer, who is independent of the research team, described the discovery as “remarkable, scientifically important and very exciting.”
“I find it amazing that humans have built a telescope that allows us to look back so far in time, and to be able to see these nascent stages of the galaxy in such a beautiful, festive way.”
Star clusters are distinguished by different colors because they are in different stages of their formation, according to Dr. Mola.
“It’s very beautiful because the early life of the galaxy was very active,” she said.
NASA“There’s a lot going on, there are new stars being born, there are massive stars dying, there’s a lot of gas and dust around and there’s nitrogen and oxygen, and because of the state they’re in, you have these beautiful colors.
“We are able to know something about the ages of each group, their element composition and the temperatures at which they formed.”
When Dr. Mola came across the galaxy, she had never seen clusters of stars in such bright and varied colors. This led her to believe there was something different about this system, so she checked how far away it was.
To her surprise, it turned out to be more than 13 billion light-years away.
The light emanating from the Firefly Sparkle came shortly after the creation of the universe, and therefore took more than 13 billion years to reach us. It is so small and so distant that even the James Webb Space Telescope would not have been able to see it if not for an extremely lucky cosmic coincidence.
There was a cluster of galaxies exactly between Firefly Sparkle and JWST, which warped spacetime to stretch out light from the distant galaxy and effectively act as a giant magnifying glass.
Astronomers call this process gravitational lensing, which in this case enabled research co-leader Dr. Karthik Iyer of Columbia University in New York, and other members of the team, to see in stunning detail for the first time how the first galaxies looked like our own. A special Milky Way was formed.
“It takes the light coming from the firefly, bends it and amplifies it so we can see it in great detail,” he told BBC News.
“Our reconstruction shows that actively forming star clumps are surrounded by scattered light from other stars. This galaxy is literally in the process of being assembled.”
“When you do all that, and we’re able to see this amazing galaxy far, far away, it’s a very magical and humbling feeling.”
