The James Webb Space Telescope managed to image a Milky Way-like galaxy earlier than researchers thought.
Telescope space James Webb continues to probe deeper into space and time than any other observatory. Now, the instrument has found a galaxy with a Milky Way-like structure 11 billion light-years away. This raises questions about our understanding of galaxy formation.
In our modern universe, about two-thirds of all spiral galaxies are “bars,” meaning they have large bar-like structures running through their centers. It consists of gas and dust that is carried from the outer reaches of the galaxy to its core, fueling star formation and the growth of supermassive black holes.
“Rods are solving a supply chain problem in the galaxy,” said Shardha Jogee, the study’s lead author. “Just as we need to transport raw materials from the port to inland factories that make a new product, a rod powerfully carries the gas to the central region where it is rapidly converted into new stars at a rate typically 10 to 100 times faster of the rest of the galaxy.”
It is generally thought that the bars appear at a certain stage in the evolution of spiral galaxies, when they acquire a sort of “maturity”. Studies have found that the percentage of galaxies with “bars” are less likely to be seen, and it is thought that before a certain point there shouldn’t be any “rod” galaxies in the universe, because there isn’t enough time for them to expand. .
Reported by New Atlas (9/1), now the James Webb Space Telescope has dispelled that notion. The observatory is designed to see further back in time than ever before, thanks to its huge main mirror, while its infrared instruments allow it to peer through the dust that obscures visible-light telescopes like Hubble.
For the new study, James Webb looked at a number of distant galaxies previously observed by Hubble, to see if he could detect new details in their structure. And indeed, the bars were clearly visible in some of them, where previously they looked like only circular spots.
“I only saw this data once and thought, ‘Let’s undo everything else!’” says Jogee. “Barely visible bars in the Hubble data have just appeared in James Webb’s images, demonstrating the extraordinary power of telescopes to observe the underlying structures of galaxies.”
The result? The galaxies are between 8 and 11 billion light-years apart, which means they are growing to advanced stages much faster than expected. This could change our understanding of the evolution of galaxies in general. In a future paper, the team plans to test different models of galaxy evolution to find the one that best fits the new observations.
