Cornell University astronomers have discovered a companion galaxy while analyzing the first images of an early galaxy taken by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope . The newfound galaxy, estimated to be 1.4 billion years old, has already hosted multiple generations of stars, which was unexpected given its young age.
Their initial focus, and the infrared observatory’s target, was SPT0418-47, one of the brightest dusty, star-forming galaxies in the early universe, its distant light bent and magnified by a foreground galaxy’s gravity into a circle, called an Einstein ring. Earlier images of the same Einstein ring captured by the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array in Chile contained hints of the companion resolved clearly by JSWT, but they couldn’t be interpreted as anything more than random noise, said Amit Vishwas, Ph.D. ’19, a research associate at the Cornell Center for Astrophysics and Planetary Sciences and the paper’s second author.
To verify their discovery, the researchers returned to earlier ALMA observations. They found an emission line of ionized carbon closely matched the redshifts observed by JWST. The two galaxies are modest in mass as galaxies in the early universe go, with “SE” relatively smaller and less dusty, making it appear bluer than the extremely dust-obscured ring. Based on images of nearby galaxies with similar colors, the researchers suggest that they may reside “in a massive dark-matter halo with yet-to-be-discovered neighbors.”
Source: Education Headlines (educationheadlines.net)
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