01/05/2023
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| Photo credit | James Webb telescope |
A team led by the University of Minnesota Twin Cities has discovered a unique, tiny galaxy that produced new stars at an extremely high rate for its size. Using observations from the James Webb Space Telescope, the team looked more than 13 billion years into the past and found this galaxy, which is among the smallest ever discovered at this distance - around 500 million years after the Big Bang. This discovery could help astronomers learn more about galaxies that were present shortly after the Universe came into existence.
The findings are published in Science, a top peer-reviewed academic journal. The University of Minnesota researchers were one of the first teams to study a distant galaxy using the James Webb Space Telescope, and their findings will be among the first ever published.
Patrick Kelly, an assistant professor in the University of Minnesota School of Physics and Astronomy, stated, “This galaxy is far beyond the reach of all telescopes except the James Webb, and these first-of-their-kind observations of the distant galaxy are spectacular,” “Here, we’re able to see most of the way back to the Big Bang, and we've never looked at galaxies when the universe was this young in this level of detail. The galaxy’s volume is roughly a millionth of the Milky Way’s, but we can see that it’s still forming the same numbers of stars each year.”
The James Webb telescope has the capability to capture a vast field of view, enabling it to image an entire galaxy cluster in one go. Through the process of gravitational lensing, the researchers were able to discover and analyze a new, small galaxy. The mass of the galaxy cluster caused the light from the background galaxy to bend and magnify, making it appear 20 times brighter. The researchers used spectroscopy to determine the galaxy's distance, physical and chemical properties. Studying these galaxies from the early stages of the Universe can aid in answering the astronomical question regarding its reionization.
“The galaxies that existed when the Universe was in its infancy are very different from what we see in the nearby Universe now,” said Hayley Williams, who first authored the paper, and a Ph.D. student at the Minnesota Institute for Astrophysics. “This discovery can help us learn more about the characteristics of those first galaxies, how they differ from nearby galaxies, and how the earlier galaxies formed.”
The scientists have found that the James Webb telescope is capable of gathering approximately 10 times more light than the Hubble Space Telescope. Additionally, it is more receptive to longer wavelengths in the infrared spectrum, especially in the red region. This new capability opens up an entirely new range of data for scientists to explore.
The research received support from several organizations, including the National Science Foundation and NASA through the Space Telescope Science Institute. Additional funding was also provided by the United States-Israel Binational Science Foundation and the Spanish State Research Agency. The research team consisted of various members from different universities and research institutions. These members included postdoctoral researcher Wenlei Chen, Professor Claudia Scarlata, Ph.D. student Yu-Heng Lin, and graduate student Noah Rogers from the University of Minnesota School of Physics and Astronomy, among others.
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