Nasa’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has for the first time captured an image of what our galaxy likely looked like just as it was forming – and it’s got space scientists feeling very Christmassy.
The image shows ten balls of stars of different colours, appearing like Christmas tree baubles hanging in the cosmos. It’s the first time that scientists have witnessed clumps of stars assembling to form a galaxy like our own Milky Way and holds clues as to how the Universe was formed.
Scientists have named the distant galaxy Firefly Sparkle, because it also looks like a swarm of multi-coloured fireflies. From its orbit in space unhindered by Earth’s atmosphere, the most powerful telescope ever built has already shown us more distant and therefore older galaxies, but not one like our own in the early stages of forming and not in such detail.
The data of what happened at this stage of the Universe is very sparse, but here, we are actually watching a galaxy as it is being formed brick by brick. The galaxies we normally see around us are already formed so this is the first time we have seen this process.
The star clusters are of different colours because they are at different stages in their formation. It is so beautiful because the early life of a galaxy is extremely active.
There is so much happening, there are new stars being born, there are massive stars dying, there is a lot of gas and dust around it and there is nitrogen and oxygen and because of the state they are in, you have these lovely colours.
We are able to tell something about the ages of each cluster, the composition of their elements and the temperatures at which they formed.
When Dr Mowla came across the galaxy, she had never seen clumps of stars in such vivid and varying colours. It led her to believe that there was something different about this system, so she checked how far away it was.
To her surprise it turned out to be more than 13 billion light years away. The light from Firefly Sparkle is from not long after the creation of the Universe and so has taken more than 13 billion years to reach us. It is so small and so far away that not even JWST would have been able to see it, were it not for an extremely lucky cosmic coincidence.
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