Star balls of different colors, like bright lights of a Christmas tree suspended in the cosmos: This is shown by the new and extraordinary images captured by the powerful eyes of NASA’s James Webb Telescope (JWST), which managed to photograph what represented the formation of our galaxy. The details were published in a study by Nature.
The “Christmas Galaxy”
From its orbit in space, the James Webb had already managed to peer into more massive and older galaxies, but until now none were like ours, the Milky Way, and above all, none showed the first stages of formation in such detail. Specifically, The telescope managed to detect a galaxy that not only existed when the Universe was about 600 million years old, but has a mass similar to what ours could have had at the same stage of development.
The new images of the “Christmas galaxy”, named by scientists as Firefly Sparkle, contain valuable clues about how the Milky Way formed. “The data on what happened at this stage of the Universe is very scarce. What we are seeing is a galaxy that forms brick by brick. The ones we normally observe are already formed, so it is the first time we see ‘the process.’ “co-author Lamiya Mowla, from Wellesley College in Massachusetts, explained to the BBC.
Illustration: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Chris Willott (National Research Council of Canada), Lamiya Mowla (Wellesley College), Kartheik Iyer (Columbia University)
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Finding Firefly Sparkle’s Age
The telescope captured ten star clusters, their total mass is ten million times greater than that of the Sun; Specialists explain that their different colors derive from the different stages of formation. “The beginning of the life of a galaxy is extremely active. There is a lot going on: new stars are born, massive stars die, there is a lot of gas and dust, nitrogen and oxygen, and because of the state they are in, the colors look very alive,” says Mowla in the report. From the analysis, specialists were able to obtain the first data on the age of each cluster, the composition of its elements and the temperatures at which they formed.
To show that Firefly Sparkle dates back to not long after the creation of the Universe, they turned to what in technical jargon is called “gravitational lensing”, a natural effect in which a cluster of galaxies is located at the center; in this case between the JWST and Firefly Sparkle, it distorts space-time to lengthen the light coming from the distant galaxy and acts as a giant magnifying glass. The process allowed Jame Webb’s already powerful eyes to see for the first time the incredible details of how the first galaxies like ours began to form in the early Universe.
“This galaxy is literally in the process of coming together, the images are the first glimpse of something that we will be able to study and learn for many years to come,” concludes Kartheik Iyer, co-author from Columbia University in New York.
Article originally published in WIRED Italy. Adapted by Alondra Flores.
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