of James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has discovered what is believed to be the oldest star cluster in the universe.
The JWST discovered five protoglobular clusters, groups of millions of stars bound together by gravity, within the Cosmic Gems Arc, a galaxy that formed just 460 million years after the birth of the universe. big bang.
The Cosmic Gems Ark gets its name from its appearance: from our solar system, the star-studded galaxy appears as a hair-thin crescent moon due to the strong gravitational influence of the foreground galaxy, which magnifies and distorts the appearance of the distant galaxy.
The galaxy is the closest region of the universe’s first 500 million years to be observed, giving astronomers an unprecedented view of how the movements of the first stars shaped the galaxy during the cosmic dawn.
The cosmic dawn encompasses the first billion years of the universe. The reionization period began about 400 million years after the Big Bang, when light from newborn stars stripped hydrogen of its electrons, Fundamental changes in galactic structure.
“The early universe is completely different from what we expected,” said lead author of the study. Angela Adamo“Galaxies are getting brighter, forming stars at a breakneck speed, and forming huge, dense star clusters. We’re building a new understanding of how early galaxies formed,” John McCain, an astronomer at Stockholm University, told Live Science.
The researchers published their findings in the journal Neurology on June 24. Nature.
Related: The James Webb Telescope has confirmed serious errors in our understanding of the universe.
The lights come on at Cosmic Down
When stars form, They throw out the material A process called stellar feedback occurs in the form of winds and jets of ionized plasma.
“For this small galaxy to form five star clusters, it had to be extremely efficient,” Adamo said. “Stellar feedback from stars within the cluster must have been very large.”
Scientists discovered the Cosmic Gems Ark using the Hubble Space Telescope in 2018. Typically, the light from galaxies this early is too faint to be detected by telescopes, but a phenomenon called gravitational lensing helps astronomers see them.
Einstein General theory of relativityGravity is the way space-time bends and warps in the presence of matter and energy. This curved space sets rules for how energy and matter move.
This means that even though light travels in a straight line, it can be bent and magnified by the presence of gravity. In this case, galaxy SPT-CL J0615-5746, which sits between the Cosmic Gems Ark and our solar system, is bending and magnifying the light of this early galaxy, making it visible through telescopes.
By pointing JWST into this curved region of space, astronomers were able to observe the Cosmic Gems Arc in unprecedented detail, resolving five globular clusters within it. They found that the clusters are incredibly dense, about three orders of magnitude denser than star-forming regions observed closer to Earth.
These galaxy clusters are among the first ever observed, but it’s still unclear whether they’re new to the world, Adamo said.
“In principle, we would expect star formation to occur in clusters even in primitive galaxies,” she added. “But [massive] “For a protoglobular cluster to form, the host galaxy needs to have the ability to create and retain enough mass in the gas, so it all depends on how fast the protogalaxy can grow.”
To learn more about the universe’s first spark in this region, researchers plan to continue spectroscopic studies with JWST, which will allow astronomers to reconstruct the cluster’s physical properties, further constrain its age, and trace the impact the cluster’s stars have had on the wider Galaxy.