NASA’s Webb may have just seen 2 galaxies merging in the early universe

A very long time in the past, astronomer Dan Coe found a galaxy far, far-off… thus far, it was thought-about to be perhaps the most distant in the universe.

Little did he know that what he noticed with the Hubble Space Telescope then, MACS0647-JD, would possibly truly be two galaxies as an alternative of 1.

Cue a cymbal crash and a John Williams musical rating. Crawl, crawl, crawl…

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The revelation that Coe’s space object would possibly truly be two galaxies merging together is yet one more new discovering in the James Webb Space Telescope saga, Hubble’s infrared successor. In a brand new weblog publish from NASA, the European Space Agency, and the Space Telescope Science Institute, Coe describes the difference the new observatory has made: What appeared as a pale pink dot 10 years in the past — a tiny galaxy a fraction of the dimension of the Milky Way in the first 400 million years after the huge bang — has slightly blue companion. Now scientists are discussing what it means.

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“If this is the most distant merger, I will be really ecstatic!” mentioned Tiger Yu-Yang Hsiao, an astronomer at Johns Hopkins University, in the NASA weblog.

“If this is the most distant merger, I will be really ecstatic!”

Astronomer Dan Coe makes use of NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope and a cosmic zoom lens to uncover a candidate for the farthest identified galaxy in the universe.
Credit: NASA / ESA / STScI

The function of the $10 billion Webb telescope is to assist scientists perceive how the first stars and galaxies shaped in the universe, estimated to be 13.8 billion years previous. In astronomy, wanting farther interprets into observing the previous as a result of mild and different types of radiation should journey unimaginable distances to succeed in us. Light will get stretched into the infrared, which human eyes cannot see however Webb’s extremely delicate mirrors can detect. Scientists then translate the information into colours.

A phenomenon often called gravitational lensing helped Webb reveal extra details about MACS0647-JD. The large gravity of a cluster of galaxies in the foreground acted as a cosmic lens, bending and magnifying mild from the distant system. Not solely did this impact make MACS0647-JD extra seen, nevertheless it scattered copies of the system at completely different scales in three elements of the picture, based on NASA.

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Prior to Webb, scientists solely knew of a handful of galaxies in the early interval of the universe, mentioned Rebecca Larson, an astronomer at the University of Texas in Austin who’s a part of the research team.

But “Studying them can help us understand how they evolved into the ones like the galaxy we live in today,” she mentioned in the weblog.

Researchers mentioned the blue gasoline in the picture signifies very younger star formation and little mud, whereas the pink is dustier and older. Scientists plan to probe deeper to find out whether or not these are two galaxies or two clumps of stars inside one galaxy.

“This is not a long exposure,” Larson mentioned. “We haven’t even really tried to use this telescope to look at one spot for a long time.”