The James Webb Telescope has revealed that about 90% of the universe’s oldest galaxies are surrounded by intensely bright gas clouds, and these clouds shine brighter than the stars inside them. This discovery challenges current models of the universe, and was published in the Astrophysical Journal.
James Webb’s observations revealed an amazing aspect of the early universe, as galaxies that formed early, about 500 million years ago after the Big Bang, appear with a brightness that defies current understanding. These galaxies, contrary to what is expected, glowed with a brilliance that is characteristic of huge galaxies like the Milky Way, but they were formed. In a much shorter period of time.
Astrophysicist Anshu Gupta explains that the unusual brightness of these galaxies is due to their interaction with neighboring galaxies, and this interaction resulted in an explosion of star formation, as the surrounding bright gases that were illuminated by lights from nearby stars cooled.
Spectrum analysis of galaxies
The telescope collected infrared images and analyzed the spectrum of these galaxies by scanning outer space, and the emission features observed were evidence that the gas is capturing and re-emitting light from massive young stars scattered in these galaxies.
The second and fourth most distant galaxies ever observed with the eagle eye of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), supporting the basic picture of galaxy formation described by the Big Bang theory.
The discovery was made possible thanks to a huge helping of gravitational lensing on the shape of the galaxy cluster known as Abell 2744, nicknamed the Pandora Cluster, which lies about 3.5 billion light-years away from us. The cluster’s enormous gravity distorts the fabric of space-time itself enough to amplify the light of the most distant galaxies.
