This week, a team of astronomers announced the first discovery of a supermassive galaxy. (3 supermassive galaxies) that formed completely in the first 1 billion years of the universe. Each has a mass 100 billion times the mass of our Sun and is almost as large as the Milky Way galaxy.
The research team said Images of these red galaxies Compiled from images and spectrograph data from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), the discovery challenges long-held views. Supermassive galaxies form after much longer times.
Peter VanDockum, Professor of Astronomy, sponsored by the Sol family. Goldman and Professor of Physics in the Yale University Faculty of Arts and Sciences Co-author of the new study in the journal Nature describes the discovery, saying: “It’s like looking at rocks from the earliest times. world history and saw full of animal fossils.”
Image showing the location of the 3 Red Devil galaxies.
This international research team is led by scientists from the University of Geneva. Three early galaxies have been identified using data from JWST’s First Reionization Epoch Spectroscopic Complete (FRESCO) survey, which lasted about 54 hours The FRESCO survey measures the distances and sizes of galaxies in detail
The capabilities of the JWST telescope allow astronomers to systematically study galaxies in the early and distant universe. Giving us a glimpse of massive, dust-covered galaxies
By analyzing the galaxies in the FRESCO survey, scientists found that most of the galaxies fit existing models, however, they also found three galaxies amazing with a similar number of stars to the Milky Way
The researchers found that these galaxies are also forming new stars at a rate almost twice as high as smaller and later galaxies. and because there is a lot of dust As a result, it is clear that the galaxies are red in the images captured by JWST.
Xiao Mengyuan, the lead researcher and a post-doctoral researcher from the University of Geneva, said that this discovery “has changed our understanding of how galaxies were formed in the early universe.” ”
Current models of galaxy formation show that most galaxies are composed of dark matter and early gas. This gas, which is a mixture of hydrogen and helium, gradually decays. It turns into stars as the galaxy ages. It is believed that only about 20% of this gas is turned into stars in the galaxy.
But Van Dokkum and his colleagues found that supermassive galaxies in the early universe could be more efficient at turning gas into stars.
“For some reason these galaxies can turn almost all of their gas into stars in a few hundred million years. which is as fast as the blink of an eye in space,” Vandockum said.
The research team emphasizes that their findings do not change the standard cosmological model for galaxy formation. But the “Red Monster” galaxy raises a new and unexpected perspective: the possibility that early diseases could have grown faster under certain conditions.
In addition, that research team also identified Future Ideas using JWST and the ALMA (Atacama Large Millimeter Array) telescope studying objects in the sky in Chile. It will help us understand these Red Monster galaxies better. and can reveal even larger galaxies.
Source: news.yale.edu, living science.com
Image credits: NASA/CSA/ESA, M. Xiao & P. A. Oesch (University of Geneva), G. Brammer (Niels Bohr Institute), JWST Dawn Archive
