Discover the hidden treasure in the first official James Webb telescope image

On the eve of the launch of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) inaugural scientific observations, released on July 12 this year, NASA decided to make a brief “spoiler” of what would happen, revealing what has gone down in history. as the first official image captured by the equipment.

It is the deepest and most distant record in the universe made with infrared technology ever and shows the galaxy cluster SMACS 0723. Now, a study published in Letters from the astrophysical diary this Thursday (29) reveals that the image, which you see below, contains hidden treasure in the form of a distant galaxy that may contain some of the first stars in the universe.

Located 9 billion light years from Earth, it is nicknamed the “Sparkler Galaxy” (something like “gaudy”), due to the small yellow, red and orange dots surrounding it, reminiscent of sequins and glitter. .

On its own, the galaxy is already notable for its strange elongated appearance, but the surrounding compact objects that inspired the moniker are of particular scientific interest, as they may be the most distant globular clusters ever observed.

Globular clusters are collections of ancient stars dating back to the infancy of a galaxy and which may contain clues to the early stages of galactic formation, growth and evolution.

Looking at the 12 compact objects around the Sparkler Galaxy, the team of study authors, project scientists Unbiased investigation of the CANadian NIRISS cluster (CANUCS), found that five of them are actually globular clusters – or bunches.

According to the researchers, these may be some of the oldest globular clusters ever seen, possibly dating back to the time when the first stars in the universe were born.

“It was really surprising to us that we were able to find such a unique object so early in the JWST data,” said Kartheik G. Iyer, an astronomer at the University of Toronto in Canada and co-author of the study, in an interview with the site. space.com. “According to our analysis, we found that most of these flares around the main body of the galaxy are really massive and truly ancient star systems.”

According to Iyer, the image captured by Webb allowed the team to observe flares at a variety of wavelengths, meaning scientists could model the bunches just to better understand their physical properties, as well as the age and number of stars they contain.

Data from the Near-Infrared Sensor and Gapless Spectrograph (NIRISS) instrument, a module for astronomical photography and spectroscopy capable of recording light in the frequency from 0.8 to 5 micrometers, revealed no signs of oxygen, which it is usually associated with young clusters that are actively forming stars.

James Webb was helped in observing the Sparkler Galaxy by both the Hubble Space Telescope, which has already recorded the galaxy but was unable to resolve the globular clusters around it, apart from a natural phenomenon called gravitational lensing.

The gravitational lens was predicted by Einstein’s general theory of relativity in 1915 and has since become a powerful tool for astronomers. General relativity says that massive objects fold the fabric of spacetime.

Basically, just like in a glass lens, the light is distorted and amplified thanks to the presence of one or more bodies of extreme mass, allowing the space-time to “contort” to the point of being visualized.

This effect is what gives the Galaxy Sparkler its odd elongated shape, enlarging it enough for the JWST to spot it. The phenomenon also causes many of the surrounding globular clusters to appear at various points in the deep field image of the space observatory.

This helped not only to observe the Sparkler Galaxy, but also to confirm that these clusters actually orbit it and are not simply “superimposed” on it in the JWST line of sight.

However, the magnification obtained by gravitational lenses is not sufficient for further study of the galaxy. “The magnification of the Sparkler galaxy and its surroundings is not as limited as we would like,” Iyer said. “So one of the things we want to do is build a better zoom model so we can figure out if it’s zoomed by a factor of 10 or a factor of 100.”

Finding out how magnified the Sparkler galaxy and its clusters are could help to more accurately determine their properties such as age and distance from Earth.

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Source: Olhar Digital