Using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), astronomers have captured a surprising picture of a “cosmic jellyfish.” This aquatic-creature-like galaxy, designated ESO 137-001, was seen because it existed 8.5 billion years in the past, or round 5.3 billion years after the Big Bang. Astronomers say it may paint a extra detailed image of the evolution of galaxies at a vital interval within the adolescent universe.
ESO 137-001 is an instance of a jellyfish galaxy, a category of galaxies that get their moniker from the truth that they possess trailing tendrils of fuel that resemble the versatile, stinging appendages of their oceanic namesakes. For jellyfish galaxies, these trails are created as they ‘swim’ by means of their galaxy cluster houses in opposition to the stream of sturdy winds that push on them, forcing out fuel, a course of known as “ram-stripping.”
“We were looking through a large amount of data from this well-studied region in the sky with the hopes of spotting jellyfish galaxies that haven’t been studied before,” team member Ian Roberts of the Waterloo Centre for Astrophysics in the Faculty of Science in the UK, said in a statement. “Early on in our search of the JWST data, we spotted a distant, undocumented jellyfish galaxy that sparked immediate interest.”
The JWST image of ESO 137-001 shows a galactic disk that appears relatively normal, not dissimilar from our own modern-day galaxy, barring the distinct gas trails. Bright blue “knots” can be seen in these tendrils that represent groupings of young stars.
The youth of these stellar bodies implies that they were born outside the main galactic disk of ESO 137-001 within these tendrils of ram-stripped gas. While this phenomenon is expected of jellyfish galaxies, the image of ESO 137-001 has delivered at least one surprise. Previously, researchers had thought that still-forming galaxy clusters that existed 8.5 billion years or so ago would not commonly produce the pressure that leads to ram-stripping.
“The first is that cluster environments were already harsh enough to strip galaxies, and the second is that galaxy clusters may strongly alter galaxy properties earlier than expected,” Roberts explained. “Another is that all the challenges listed might have played a part in building the large population of dead galaxies we see in galaxy clusters today. This data provides us with rare insight into how galaxies were transformed in the early universe.”
The team now intends to continue studying ESO 137-001 with the JWST, hoping to solve further mysteries regarding this and other jellyfish galaxies.
The team’s results were published on Tuesday (Feb. 17) in The Astrophysical Journal.