To discover James Webb Space Telescopethe “most powerful” telescope. NASAthe oldest star clusters ever seen.
Astronomers have identified 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 can include clusters of millions of the earliest and oldest stars in the universe.
The results come from the scientific analysis of James Webb’s first image, Webb’s first deep field. That image, containing thousands of glittering galaxies, became famous as the first image released by NASA’s new telescope.
The James Webb Telescope was built to find the first stars and galaxies and to help us understand the origins of complexity in the universe, such as the chemical elements and building blocks of life.
“This first deep-field discovery by Webb really gives a detailed look at the first stage of star formation, confirming the extraordinary 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 of the study.
Read also | James Webb Telescope reveals images of NASA spacecraft deliberately colliding with asteroid Demorphos
The findings are just the latest discovery from the James Webb Space Telescope, which scientists say could fundamentally change the way we work in astronomy thanks to the large amount of data it can provide.
Scientists focused on analyzing the first James Webb telescope image of 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 shortly thereafter. the Big Bang.
Nicknamed the “Sparkler galaxy”, it got its name thanks to the compact objects that appear as small yellow-red dots surrounding it, which the researchers called “scintillations”.
Scientists have speculated that this “sparkling twinkle” could be both small clusters of energetic stars born three billion years after the Big Bang at the height of star formation, and ancient globular clusters.
Oh! 🤩 Using #Webb, Canadian researchers have identified the most distant globular clusters ever discovered, within 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 born with the birth of a galaxy and contain clues to the early stages of their formation and growth.
Scientists examined 12 of these bodies and found that five of them are globular clusters, but they are among the oldest known clusters.
“Because we have been able to detect brightness over 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 University of Toronto Astronomy and Astrophysics 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 spur further science and research into similar objects “.
Still, 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 observed closely enough to understand what it is and how old it might be.
