The seven galaxies highlighted here by the five boxes are some of the most distant galaxy clusters ever discovered.
Images: NASA, ESA, CSA, Takahiro Morishita (IPAC) Image processing: Alyssa Pagan (STScI)
Astronomers used the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) to discover the most distant cluster of galaxies ever discovered. All seven galaxies in this blob had been previously observed by the Hubble Space Telescope, but scientists didn’t know how far apart they were or whether they were truly connected. .
Takahiro Morishita and his colleagues at Caltech used the JWST’s spectrometer to measure the redshifts of these galaxies. Redshift is a phenomenon caused by the expansion of the universe, meaning that distant objects are moving away faster. This changes the wavelength of light, much like the pitch of a siren changes as an ambulance passes by.
“We’ve known for some time that there’s an interesting galaxy overdensity from the Hubble data,” Morishita said. They were lined up at the move.”
Because it takes time for light to travel from a distant object to the position of the JWST orbiting the Sun, telescopes look at these galaxies about 650 million years after the Big Bang. The protostar clusters we see today look small. But if that light could reach us in an instant and we could see what it looks like today, it would probably be gigantic and gravitationally roped to thousands of other galaxies.
“These distant galaxies look like tiny droplets of water in different rivers,” Benedetta Vulcani of Italy’s National Institute of Astrophysics said in a statement. You can see that it will be part of the river.” The researchers’ simulations suggest that this protostar cluster could become one of the most massive star clusters in the universe.
topic:
- galaxy/
- james webb space telescope
