The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) sighted that 350-40, a giant disc that goes back to the primitive universe. This discovery is the result of the work of a research team coordinated by Weichen Wang and Sebastiano Cantalupo, researcher and professor of the Department of Physics at the University of Milan-Bicocca.
Until now, the JWST had detected much smaller galactic discs than those we are used to observing in the local universe. On the other hand, the newly identified galaxy is three times greater than those discovered with stellar masses and similar cosmic temporal scales. He study It was published in Nature Astronomy.
A look at the past
“When and how galactic discs are formed, it is still an enigma in modern astronomy,” explains Cantalupo. He adds that the first years of observations of the James Webb space telescope revealed multiple galactic discs in the early universe, corresponding to a cosmic era of eleven billion years ago, or two billion years after the Big Bang. “However, before our observation, the space instrument had only discovered galactic discs much smaller than those we see in the local universe. For this reason, until now it was thought that the formation of the largest discs had occurred during most of the Universe age“
The authors of the study analyzed a set of data collected by the JWST, related to a region of the sky between 11,000 and 12,000 million light years of us and immersed in a structure that will probably evolve until it becomes a cluster of galaxies. It is a very special region of the universe, characterized by a large concentration of galaxies, gas and black holes.
Both NASA projects departed in the same Spacex rocket with the aim of deploying in the same orbit and revealing the mysteries of the sun and other galaxies.
The newly discovered disc galaxy
Wang explains that they used two instruments to identify galaxies within the Hyperdense region: the nearby infrared chamber and the nearby infrared spectrograph on board the JWST. After, The researchers analyzed their morphology and characteristics until identifying a surprisingly large galaxy, which they decided to call Big Wheel (big steering wheel)precisely because of its enormous size. “It is three times greater than the discovered galaxies, and it is also at least three times greater than the predicted by the current cosmological simulations. It is comparable to the size of the majority of the mass discs observed in the current universe,” continues Wang. Subsequent spectroscopic analysis have confirmed that Big Wheel is a disc that turns like a spiral galaxy, that is, as the dairy path.
The authors speculate that the rapid and early growth of this disk galaxy could have something to do with the especially dense environment in which it is located, although more data is needed to confirm this possibility. “Exceptionally dense environments such as the one that houses Big Wheel are still a relatively unexplored territory. Specific observations will be required to build a statistical sample of giant discs in the early universe and thus open a new window to the first stages of galaxies formation,” Cantantupo concludes.
Article originally published in Wired Italy. Adapted by Alondra Flores.
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