This page was generated automatically; to view the article at its initial source, you can follow the link below:
https://www.space.com/space-exploration/james-webb-space-telescope/james-webb-space-telescope-spots-record-breaking-collection-of-stars-in-far-flung-galaxy
and if you wish to have this article removed from our site, please reach out to us
New year, new achievement: A cosmic peculiarity has enabled the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) to acquire images of 44 distinct stars in a galaxy located halfway across the visible universe — this area is so remote that astronomers previously believed it was implausible to identify individual stars within it, akin to attempting to locate dust particles inside craters on the moon with binoculars.
“I never imagined Webb would observe them in such substantial quantities,” stated Rogier Windhorst, an astronomer from Arizona State University, who participated in the discovery team, in a statement. “And now we find ourselves witnessing these stars flickering in and out of the images captured merely a year apart, much like fireflies in the dark. Webb continues to astound us all.”
Apart from being a technological marvel, this discovery offers a chance to investigate the elusive nature of dark matter, according to researchers.
The recently identified 44 stars — the most significant congregation of stars ever detected in the far-reaching universe — are part of a distant, concealed galaxy whose light has been distorted into the remarkably elongated filament in the upper left of the image, termed the Dragon. Light from the Dragon’s host galaxy commenced its voyage through space around 6.5 billion years ago, during an epoch when the universe was only half its current age. By scrutinizing the colors of each of the newly identified stars within the Dragon, the scientists deduced that they are red supergiants in their terminal phases, similar to the well-known — possibly soon-to-explode — Betelgeuse situated on the right shoulder of the constellation Orion.
The Dragon is, in reality, a compilation of multiple duplicated images of a solitary background spiral galaxy, breathtaking cosmic illusions triggered by its fortuitous alignment behind the Abell 370 galaxy cluster. Abell 370 itself serves as a bustling habitat for an astonishing variety of several hundred galaxies interconnected by gravity, located about 4 billion light-years from us in the constellation Cetus. Approximately a hundred other distant, unseen galaxies manifest as faint glimmers within the galaxy cluster, which acts as a colossal, intervening cosmic lens, amplifying and distorting light from these background galaxies and allowing them to be detected with powerful telescopes like the JWST. Investigating these arcs of light enables astronomers to examine remote galaxies with much greater detail than would otherwise be achievable.
Fengwu Sun, a postdoctoral researcher at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian, and a co-author of the study, discovered the collection of stars while searching for a gravitationally lensed galaxy in images of the Dragon captured by the JWST in 2022 and 2023. “When we processed the data, we recognized that there seemed to be a multitude of individual star points,” he mentioned in the statement. “It was an exhilarating discovery because it was the first time we could observe so many individual stars from such a great distance.”
However, even the formidable JWST would find it challenging to locate such a high quantity of bright stars without the coincidental help of floating stars within Abell 370, which briefly aligned with stars in the hidden background galaxy and further amplified them through gravitational effects, as noted in a paper authored by Sun and his colleagues published Monday (Jan. 6) in the journal Nature Astronomy.
Due to slight variations these events induced in the gravitational lensing landscape, the brightness of the stars fluctuated over time, causing them to “appear and vanish from image to image like a twinkling Christmas tree,” study co-author Nicholas Foo from Arizona State University remarked in the statement.
A study detailing these findings was published on Jan. 6 in the journal Nature Astronomy.
This page was generated automatically; to view the article at its initial source, you can follow the link below:
https://www.space.com/space-exploration/james-webb-space-telescope/james-webb-space-telescope-spots-record-breaking-collection-of-stars-in-far-flung-galaxy
and if you wish to have this article removed from our site, please reach out to us
