Discover James Webb Space Telescopethe “most powerful” telescope Nasathe oldest star clusters ever seen.
Astronomers have spotted the first stunning images of the most distant globular clusters ever discovered, found in a 9-billion-year-old galaxy.
According to scientists, these star clusters may include clumps of millions of the first and oldest stars in the universe.
The results come from scientific analysis of James Webb’s first image, Webb’s First Deep Field. That image, containing thousands of shimmering galaxies, became famous as the first image released from NASA’s new telescope.
The James Webb Telescope was built to find the first stars and first galaxies and to help us understand the origins of complexity in the universe, such as the chemical elements and the building blocks of life.
“This first deep-field discovery by Webb really takes a detailed look at the first stage of star formation, confirming the amazing power of the James Webb Telescope,” says Lamia Moola, of the Dunlap Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics at the University of Toronto and co-lead author on the study.
The results are just the latest breakthrough from the James Webb Space Telescope, which scientists have suggested could fundamentally change the way we work in astronomy due to the vast amount of data it can provide us.
Scientists focused in analyzing the first image of the James Webb Telescope on one of the galaxies, which is 9 billion light-years from Earth, and revealed that it shines with some of the oldest known star clusters, dating back to shortly after the Big Bang.
Dubbed the “Sparkler galaxy”, it got its name thanks to the compact objects that appear as small yellow-red dots surrounding it, which the researchers referred to as “scintillations”.
Scientists hypothesised that this “sparkling glint” could be either small groups of energetic stars born three billion years after the Big Bang at the height of star formation – or ancient globular clusters.
Wow! ???? Using #WebbCanadian researchers have identified the most distant globular clusters ever discovered, inside the Sparkler galaxy located 9 billion light-years away! ⭐️ pic.twitter.com/e6Imwl7kg7
— Canadian Space Agency (@csa_asc) September 29, 2022
Globular clusters are ancient groups of stars that were born with the birth of a galaxy and contain clues about the early stages of their formation and growth.
Scientists looked at 12 of these bodies, and found that five of them are globular clusters, but they are among the oldest known clusters.
“Because we’ve been able to detect brightness across a range of wavelengths, we can model them and better understand their physical properties, such as their age and the number of stars they contain,” Karthik J. Iyer, of the Dunlap Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics at the University of Toronto and co-author of the study, said in a statement. The knowledge that globular clusters can be observed from such remote distances using James Webb will stimulate further science and the search for similar objects.”
And yet, it was already difficult to see those things about the luminescence galaxy. But the increased sensitivity of NASA’s new telescope means it can be looked at closely enough to understand what it is, and how old it might be.