The James Webb Space Telescope is returning even more breathtaking images of space, this time from the distant past. The brand-new spacecraft’s images show distant galaxies with structures similar to our own Milky Way.
The stellar bars, which are elongated structures of stars stretching out from the center to the outer discs of galaxies around 11 billion years ago, are depicted in the James Webb images, which were taken when the galaxy was just 25% of its current age.
“I said, ‘We are dropping everything else!'” when I first saw these data. outlined the astronomy professor at The University of Texas at Austin, Shardha Jogee, in a press release.
“The bars that were barely visible in the Hubble data just popped out in the JWST image, demonstrating the tremendous power of JWST to see the underlying structure in galaxies,” the article states.
Imágenes de la galaxia EGS23205. A la izquierda la tomada por el telescopio Hubble y a la derecha la del James Webbhttps://t.co/975rFJYg8C pic.twitter.com/ah5sYZfSzJ
— Ramón (@Ramon_E_G) January 7, 2023
As we learn more about spiral galaxies and the reasons for their similarity to the Milky Way, our understanding of how they develop and change may shift.
A hazy disk-shaped smudge was all that was seen in previous images of distant galaxies taken by the Hubble telescope, which was obscured by the glare and dust of young stars. The re-capture of these photographs by James Webb provided a wealth of new information.
The large mirror that James Webb used makes it better at gathering light. It is able to see through the dust with greater precision thanks to the longer infrared wavelengths, which also help identify the underlying structure.
Yuchen “Kay” Guo, a graduate student who led the data analysis, was quoted by Study Finds as saying, “For this study, we are looking at a new regime where no one had used this kind of data or done this kind of quantitative analysis before.”
Therefore, nothing is old. It’s like entering a forest that no one has ever entered before.
It would appear that a galaxy with the name EGS-23205 is a spiral galaxy with a distinct star bar. Astronomers say that another barred galaxy, EGS-2468, could have formed 11 billion years ago. The telescope found four more barred galaxies that were older than eight million years.
Because they direct gas into a galaxy’s core, galaxy bars are essential to its evolution. The gas, in turn, encourages the formation of stars.
Jogee stated, “Bars solve the supply chain problem in galaxies.”
Similar to how we must transport raw materials from the harbor to the inland factories that create new products, a bar moves gas into the galaxy’s center at a rate that is typically 10 to 100 times faster than in the rest of the galaxy.
Bars can also play a role in the formation of supermassive black holes in the core of the galaxy by directing gas.
Astronomers’ beliefs regarding the formation of galaxies are challenged by the discovery that spiral bars may have a mechanism to accelerate the formation of new stars in the early epochs. Because they add yet another variable to the physics of the galaxy, these early bars also go against the current understanding of the universe.
The study has been accepted, according to a StudyFinds report, and will soon be published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.
