These clusters were spotted in the "Sparkler Galaxy," notable captured by the James Webb Space Telescope’s First Deep Field image in July.
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Meanwhile, the findings of this study were published yesterday in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, and can be accessed here.įor weather, science, and COVID-19 updates on the go, download The Weather Channel App (on Android and iOS store).In a galaxy nine billion light years away shines a form of star clusters that these Canadian researchers hope will shed new details on the universe’s earliest discoveries.Ī team of researchers with the Canadian Near-Infrared Imager and Slitless Spectrograph Unbiased Cluster Survey (CANUCS) team found evidence of the oldest distant globular clusters.
These studies will model the clusters to understand the lensing effect, while also executing robust analyses to elaborate on the history of star formation.
Thanks to this improved technology and aiding phenomena, the research team is hoping to make more such discoveries next month, when the James Webb telescope will turn its attention toward the CANUCS galaxy clusters. They only became visible when the JWST's increased resolution and sensitivity were combined with the natural magnification afforded by the gravitational lensing effect, which was created by the SMACS 0723 galaxy cluster in their foreground. Previous observations of the Sparkler Galaxy, made using the Hubble telescope, had failed to show the compact objects that surrounded it. We are observing the Sparkler as it was nine billion years ago, when the universe was only four-and-a-half billion years old.” Because the Sparkler galaxy is much farther away than our own Milky Way, it is easier to determine the ages of its globular clusters. All we are aware of is that they can be extremely ancient, but measuring their age hasn’t been possible until the arrival of the Webb Telescope.Įlaborating on this find, another Dunlap fellow and study co-lead, Lamiya Mowla, added: “These newly identified clusters were formed close to the first time it was even possible to form stars. While our Milky Way galaxy is home to about 150 globular clusters, we still do not know enough about exactly how and when these dense star clumps formed. Iyer, a fellow at the Dunlap Institute for Astronomy & Astrophysics at the University of Toronto and co-lead author of the study. We hope the knowledge that globular clusters can be observed from such great distances with JWST will spur further science and searches for similar objects,” said Kartheik G. “Since we could observe the sparkles across a range of wavelengths, we could model them and better understand their physical properties, like how old they are and how many stars they contain. It had been argued that these sparkles represent one of two phenomena: either younger clusters of actively-forming stars born during the peak of star formation in the universe (about three billion years after the Big Bang) or much older globular clusters - ancient collections of stars from a galaxy's infancy, containing clues about its formation and growth.įollowing the initial analysis of 12 such compact objects from Webb’s finely-detailed image, the researchers were able to determine that five of those are, indeed, globular clusters - and not just any clusters, but one of the oldest ones we have known! The galaxy got its name from its surrounding yellow-red dots, which actually look like sparkles. Using the first deep field image captured by JWST, the research team managed to zero in on the ‘Sparkler Galaxy’ that’s located nine billion light years away from us. In fact, these ‘globular clusters’ may even contain some of the first and oldest stars in the universe! With the help of Webb, researchers from the Canadian NIRISS Unbiased Cluster Survey (CANUCS) recently identified the most distant groups of stars ever found.
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Now, nearly three months since the telescope began full scientific operations, it is already starting to deliver on its biggest promises. It was dubbed as a powerful time machine capable of looking 13.5 billion years into the past, and observing the first stars and galaxies to have emerged out of the darkness of the early universe. Even before its launch, high hopes were pinned on the James Webb Space Telescope, as it was expected to resolve several long-standing mysteries of the universe.
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