![]() “JWST was built to find the first stars and the first galaxies and to help us understand the origins of complexity in the universe, such as the chemical elements and the building blocks of life,” said Lamiya Mowla, co-lead study author and Dunlap Fellow at the Dunlap Institute for Astronomy & Astrophysics at the University of Toronto, in a statement. ![]() A study detailing the findings were published Thursday in The Astrophysical Journal Letters. These clusters are dense groups that contain millions of stars, some of which may be the first and oldest stars in the universe. Now, researchers have conducted an analysis of Webb’s first deep field and spotted the most distant globular clusters ever seen. The galaxy cluster is shown as it appeared 4.6 billion years ago. Some of these distant galaxies and star clusters have never been seen before. “We're seeing these really pretty spirals, these merging galaxies, all of these like weird objects with the Webb data that Hubble didn't have enough resolution to see, so it's really cool.The image of SMACS 0723 is "the deepest and sharpest infrared image of the distant universe to date," according to NASA. “It's showing us the higher edge of the universe that up until now was all of these faint fuzzy blobs, which actually have a lot more structure to it than we expected,” he said. Iyer says their research is a testament to the incredible data that has been found since the James Webb telescope’s launch less than a year ago that he said its predecessor, the Hubble Space telescope, took years to capture. ![]() Iyer says through further investigation with the NIR they are hoping to determine how big these clusters are, how they are formed and even more details on the Sparkler Galaxy itself. “Objects like the Sparkler were an ‘unknown unknown' – we didn't know that we didn't know about them – so finding it was really exciting,” Iyer said to CTVNews.ca on Thursday.Īs they continue with their research, both say they are looking forward to discovering what else they can learn about these globular clusters and perhaps similar "unknown unknown" objects they didn’t know about. Iyer says while the Webb telescope was intended to find early data of the universe, their team was still surprised to find these clusters, specifically ones that are billions of years old. However, it was the Canadian-made Near-Infrared Imager and Slitless Spectrograph (NIRISS) instrument on Webb telescope that was able to determine how old these clusters are. The researchers were able to observe the objects through the use of the James Webb telescope’s Near-Infrared (NIR) camera, along with archival data from the Hubble Space telescope. “So that means that these stars were formed very early on in the universe, right after the big bang, where the first stars were getting born that's the era when the star clusters were born,” Mowla said to CTVNews.ca in a phone interview on Thursday. Out of the 12 globular clusters analyzed, five of them are estimated to be about four billion years old themselves. Their team observed the galaxy as it was nine billion years ago, when the universe was just four-and-a-half billion years old. ![]() Lamiya Mowla and Kartheik Iyer, co-lead authors and fellows at the Dunlap Institute for Astronomy & Astrophysics at the University of Toronto, published their findings on Thursday in the Astrophysical Journal Letters. These clusters were spotted in the "Sparkler Galaxy," notable captured by the James Webb Space Telescope’s First Deep Field image in July. In a galaxy nine billion light years away shines a form of star clusters that these Canadian researchers hope will shed new details on the universe’s earliest discoveries.Ī team of researchers with the Canadian Near-Infrared Imager and Slitless Spectrograph Unbiased Cluster Survey (CANUCS) team found evidence of the oldest distant globular clusters.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |