Looking at distant objects in the universe can be thought of as looking back in time. Since the speed of light is limited, light reflected from very distant objects can take millions or even billions of years to reach us. Therefore, very distant objects appear to be very young objects, just like when the universe was young. So it’s understandable that astronomers are surprised to find a very distant galaxy that appears to be quite old.
This galaxy found ZF-UDS-7329 It is called. Observations show that the galaxy’s light dates back 11.5 billion years and that its huge stellar population It already existed 13 billion years ago is showing. All the stars in that galaxy are at least twice the mass of the stars in our galaxy, the Milky Way, and it has taken billions of years for our galaxy to grow that much. It is currently unknown how a galaxy can grow so much in just a few hundred million years.
Co-author from Swinburne University of Technology Dr. Themiya Nanayakkara “We are now going beyond what is possible to confirm the oldest giant, inert monsters that existed deep within the universe,” he said in a statement. This pushes the boundaries of our current understanding of how galaxies form and evolve. “The question now is how they formed so quickly in the very early universe, and what mysterious mechanisms prevented them from suddenly forming stars while the rest of the universe was doing so.”
The galaxy was first described many years ago, but its truly unusual features could not be detected by ground-based observatories. Only James Webb Thanks to the superior perspective of the space telescope, astronomers were able to examine this situation accurately. Since JWST is in space, it is not affected by the limitations caused by the Earth’s atmosphere.
Editorial again from Swinburne Professor Karl Glazebrook, “We have been tracking this particular galaxy for seven years and have spent hours observing it with two of the largest telescopes in the world to figure out how old it is. But it was too red and too faint and we couldn’t measure it. “In the end, we had to go outside Earth and use JWST to confirm its nature,” he said. “This is from the infrared sky surveys we started in 2010, which led us to identify this galaxy as unusual, to the long hours we tested at Keck and the Very Large Telescope.” “It was very much a team effort, but we weren’t able to confirm it until last year when we put a tremendous amount of effort into figuring out how to process the JWST data and analyze this spectrum.”
Although this is a single object, the results, combined with other unusual discoveries, point to greater complexity in the early universe than previously thought. This complexity may have to do with how dark matter comes together. Galaxies form in the gravitational wells of these primitive dark matter halos. Of course, it is possible that there are other processes in galaxy evolution that we cannot yet detect.
from the University of Western Australia They teach Claudia Lagos“Galaxy formation is largely determined by how dark matter condenses,” he says. “Having such massive galaxies so early in the universe poses significant challenges to our standard model of cosmology. This is because we think that dark matter structures large enough to host these huge galaxies have not yet had time to form. “More observations are needed to understand how common these galaxies may be and to help us understand how large these galaxies really are.”
The study was published in Nature.
2024-02-18 20:59:00
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