A team of Canadian astronomers, including experts from the Dunlap Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics at the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences, have used the James Webb Telescope to identify the most distant globular clusters ever discovered: groups dense with millions of stars that may be relics containing the first and oldest stars in the universe. The Astrophysical Journal Letters published an early study of Webb’s first deep-field image, which shows some of the earliest galaxies in the cosmos.
“JWST was built to find the first stars and the first galaxies and to help us understand the origins of complexity in the universe, such as the chemical elements and building blocks of life,” says Lamiya Mowla, researcher postdoctoral fellow of the Institute. Dunlap Institute for Astronomy & Astrophysics and co-lead author of the study, which was conducted by the Canadian NIRISS Unbiased Cluster Survey (CANUCS) team. “This discovery in Webb’s first deep field already provides a detailed view of the earliest phase of star formation, confirming the incredible power of JWST.”
Astronomers focused on the “Sparkler galaxy” nine billion light-years away in Webb’s first, highly detailed deep-field photograph. The compact objects that surround this galaxy and look like small yellow-red blobs have been nicknamed “glows” by scientists. The research team suggested that these sparks may represent young clusters of stars that are actively developing, which would have formed three billion years after the Big Bang, at the height of the creation of stars, or older globular clusters. Globular clusters are ancient groups of stars from the beginning of a galaxy and provide information about the early stages of its development and expansion.
The researchers found that five of these compact objects are among the oldest known globular clusters after doing initial research on 12 of these compact objects. “Looking at the first images from JWST and discovering ancient globular clusters around distant galaxies was an incredible moment, one that was not possible with previous images from the Hubble Space Telescope,” says Kartheik G. Iyer, a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute Dunlap. for Astronomy and Astrophysics and co-lead author of the study.
“Because we could observe the sparks across a range of wavelengths, we could model them and better understand their physical properties, such as how old they are and how many stars they contain. We hope that the knowledge that the clusters globulars can be observed from such a large. distances with JWST will stimulate further science and searches for similar objects.” The Milky Way is known to contain approximately 150 globular clusters, but it is unclear exactly how and when these massive collections of stars formed. Although globular clusters can be quite old, astronomers have a hard time determining their ages. It has never been done before, and only JWST makes it possible, to age early stars in distant galaxies using extremely remote globular clusters.
“These newly identified clusters formed near the first time it was even possible to form stars,” says Mowla. “Because the Sparkler Galaxy is so much further away than our own Milky Way, it’s easier to determine the age of its globular clusters. We’re looking at the Sparkler as it was nine billion years ago, when the universe was only four and one -Half a billion years, looking at something that happened a long time ago Think of it like guessing a person’s age based on their appearance: it’s easy to tell the difference between a five-year-old and ten years, but hard to understand. the difference between a 50-year-old and a 55-year-old.” The Hubble Space Telescope has not yet been able to detect the compact objects surrounding the Sparkler Galaxy. That changed with JWST’s improved sensitivity and resolution, which allowed Webb’s first deep-field image to see the faint spots around the galaxy for the first time. The foreground galaxy cluster SMACS 0723 distorts what lies behind it like a large magnifying glass, causing gravitational lensing, which magnifies the Sparkler galaxy by a factor of 100. In addition, the Sparkler is visible in three different views thanks to gravitational lensing, which allows scientists to examine the galaxy in more detail.
“Our study of the Sparkler highlights the enormous power of combining the unique capabilities of JWST with the natural magnification provided by gravitational lensing,” says CANUCS team leader Chris Willott of the Center for Research in ‘Astronomy and Astrophysics Herzberg of the National Research Council. “The team is excited about the discoveries to come when JWST turns its eyes to the CANUCS galaxy clusters next month.” (ANI)
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