The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has imaged seven galaxies forming a massive galaxy cluster in the early stages of its evolution.
The galaxies are seen as they were just 650 million years later Big Bangmeaning they form the youngest so-called “protocluster” ever seen by astronomers.
The protocluster will eventually increase in mass and size through incorporation galaxiesforming a cluster of galaxies similar to the Coma Cluster, which NASA has dubbed the “modern monsters”. universe.” Observing these seven galaxies could therefore help scientists better understand how the cosmos evolved over its 13.8 billion year existence to take the form we see in the local Universe today.
“This is a very special, unique place of accelerated galaxy evolution and the JWST has given us the unprecedented ability to measure the velocities of these seven galaxies and reliably confirm that they are bound together in a protocluster,” said the study’s lead author Takahiro Morishita, a scientist at the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center at the California Institute of Technology in pasadena said in a statement (opens in new tab).
Related: Images from the James Webb Space Telescope: 12 Amazing Views of Our Universe (Gallery)
The team found that the galaxies move through a halo of at over 2 million miles an hour, about 1,000 times faster than a bullet fired from a gun Dark matter. Key to this and to determining the distances between the galaxies were precise measurements taken by Webb’s Near-Infrared Spectrograph (NIRSpec).
The NIRSpec data allowed the team to model how the galaxy group evolves over time and get a picture of what this cluster should look like in the modern Universe. They predicted that the protocluster will be similar to that coma clustermeaning it could now be one of the densest clusters of galaxies in the cosmos, with thousands of individual member galaxies.
“We can see these distant galaxies like small water droplets in different rivers, and we can see that eventually they all become part of one big, powerful river,” said team member Benedetta Vulcani of the National Institute of Astrophysics in Italy in the same statement.
Until the launch of JWST in December 2021, astronomers struggled to study how galaxy clusters like the Coma Cluster came together in the young Universe. This is a result of expansion of the universe stretches the wavelengths of light leaving these clusters as they travel billions of years to reach Earth.
This stretch or “redshift,” causes light to move down toward the “red end” of the electromagnetic spectrum. The light emanating from the earliest galaxies, which existed shortly after the Big Bang and came together to give birth to the first galaxy clusters, has been stretched into the infrared portion of the spectrum.
As the most powerful space telescope ever invented, the JWST was specifically designed to see the universe in the infrared – meaning astronomers can finally start exploring the missing pieces of the puzzle of galactic evolution.
The seven galaxies studied in this research were selected by the Hubble Space Telescope as part of the Frontier Fields program for further study by JWST. Hubble doesn’t see deep into the infrared end of the spectrum, which limits the detail it can collect about these early galaxies. But JWST is well equipped to study light that is strongly redshifted.
And studying such protoclusters in the early Universe could get a massive boost if the JWST teams up with another powerful telescope in the future.
NASA is imminent Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is a wide-field survey mission that will also observe the cosmos in high-resolution infrared. Roman, scheduled for launch in 2027, is capable of capturing a field of view 200 times larger than Hubble’s and should be able to spot many more protocluster candidates for JWST to follow up for deeper investigations can become.
“It’s amazing the science we can dream of now that we have the JWST,” Tommaso Treu, a study team member from the University of California, Los Angeles, said in the same statement. “With this small protocluster of seven galaxies, we had a 100% spectroscopic confirmation rate at this great distance, demonstrating the future potential for dark matter mapping and filling the timeline of the early evolution of the Universe.”
The team’s research was published in this week Astrophysical Journal Letters (opens in new tab).
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