Mirror telescopes use the gravity of galaxy clusters to see behind them.
REPUBLIKA.CO.ID, WASHINGTON – In dark matter, the United States Air Force and Space Observatory (NASA) captured light that was bent in the distant universe. Mirror Space Telescope The great James Webb used gravity cluster of galaxies to see known galaxies far back.
But there is a surprise that new research published on Wednesday (10/26/2022) suggests that Webb could see two galaxies instead of one. This region was previously photographed by the Hubble Space Telescope, but this new view is sharper than ever.
“We are actively discussing whether they are two galaxies or two groups of stars within a galaxy,” Dan Coe, Space Telescope Science Institute astronomer, near-infrared camera instrument scientist, said in a NASA statement. by Webb.
“We don’t know, but this is a statement designed by Webb to help us respond.”
Hubble sees the object, discovered 10 years ago and called MACS00647-JD, as a “pale red dot” formed just 400 million years after the Big Bang that started the universe, according to Coe. While Webb revealed that one object is actually two, the nature of what the new telescope sees remains a mystery.
Webb’s team is engaged in ongoing scientific publications and, as such, the results have not yet been peer-reviewed and are still under preliminary discussion. If Webb observes two galaxies, there is an even more interesting possibility: galaxy mergers could take place in the early universe.
“If this is the farthest merger, I’ll be very happy,” said Tiger Yu-Yang Hsiao, Ph.D. graduate students at Johns Hopkins University, in the same statement, but if Webb saw two star clusters or two galaxies, there is. it was a clear difference between them: one set of objects was slightly bluer, with many stars, and others a little redder with a lot of dust.
The use of Webb’s gravitational lenses is nothing new to astronomy, but harnessing the ability of large objects to bend light will bring new insights with the telescope’s sensitive instruments. Webb has been optimized to visualize the early universe, which is rapidly receding from us in the infrared wavelengths.
The 20 years of space observation that Webb hopes will greatly expand our initial catalog of galaxies from “only a dozen” objects to many more, said Rebecca Larson, a National Science Foundation researcher and Ph.D. graduate student at the university. of Texas to Austin.
“Studying them can help us understand how they evolved in the galaxies we live in today and also how the universe has evolved over time,” Larson said in the same statement. Larson added that he looks forward to when Webb can create an “internal field” from a single point in the sky, as Hubble has done many times, because this will reveal more objects in the early universe.
