During its journey in space, the James Webb Telescope revealed a new surprise, which was the observation of a “dead” galaxy when the age of the universe did not exceed 5% of its current age.
Scientists announced that the telescope observed a galaxy that actually stopped forming stars about 13.1 billion years ago.
While many dead galaxies have been observed over the years, the newly discovered galaxy is considered the oldest by about 500 million years.
A puzzling and interesting discovery
“It appears that the galaxy lived a fast and violent life and then stopped forming stars very quickly,” explains Tobias Loser, an astrophysicist from the Kavli Institute of Cosmology at the University of Cambridge, and the lead author of the study published in the scientific journal Nature.
He added: “For the first few hundred million years of its history, the universe was violent and active, and gas was abundant to power the process of star formation in galaxies, which makes this discovery very puzzling and interesting.”
The researchers determined that this galaxy went through a burst of star formation that lasted from 30 to 90 million years and then suddenly stopped, and they are trying to discover the reason.
Clients suggest that this may be due to the impact of a supermassive black hole in the center of the galaxy or to a phenomenon called “feedback”, which is a burst of energy emanating from newly forming stars, which pushed the gas needed to form new stars out of the galaxy.
How do galaxies die?
After they stop forming stars, galaxies become a bit of a stellar graveyard.
In this regard, Francesco Di Eugeno, an astrophysicist at the Kavli Institute, explains that “once star formation ends, existing stars die and are not replaced.”
This happens in a hierarchical manner, arranged according to stellar weight, Di Eugino explains, “because the most massive stars are the hottest and brightest, and as a result they are the shortest-lived.”
The physicist adds: “With the disappearance of the hottest stars, the color of the galaxy changes from blue, which is the color of hot stars, to yellow and then red, which is the color of smaller stars.”
James Webb Telescope
Since entering service in 2022, NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has revealed many surprises about the universe in its early stages, and it continues to dazzle astronomers with its unprecedented, accurate images.
For the first time, he measured the temperature of distant rocky planets, and observed young stars and black holes, bringing about a major change in knowledge about the universe, and scientific studies based on the observations he carried out abounded.
Through it, the dead galaxy was observed at some point in time, and the researchers stated that it was likely that it later resumed star formation.
“Some galaxies may undergo a renewal process if they can find new gas to turn into new stars,” Di Eugenio said. “We don’t know the ultimate fate of this galaxy. This may depend on the mechanism that caused star formation to stop.”
