Space and astronomy news
The ancient Firefly Sparkle galaxy is precursor to galaxies like the Milky Way. The JWST found ten separate clusters in the galaxy that show how the galaxy is growing through mergers. Image Credit: Mowla et al. 2024.
The JWST can effectively see back in time to when the Universe was only about 5% as old as it is now. In that distant past, structures that would eventually become as massive as the Milky Way, and even larger, were only about 1/10,000th as massive as they are now. What clues can the powerful infrared space telescope uncover that show us how galaxies grew so large?
“The Firefly Sparkle provides an unprecedented case study of a Milky Way-like galaxy in the earliest stages of its assembly in only a 600 million-year-old Universe,”Despite the JWST’s power, this distant, ancient galaxy is only visible through the gravitational lensing of a massive cluster of foreground galaxies. The lensing makes the Firefly Sparkle appear as an arc.
earliest and most gas-rich stage of formation,” the authors write. The young galaxy’s mass is concentrated in 10 clusters, which range from about 200,000 solar masses to 630,000 solar masses. According to the authors, these clusters “straddle the boundary between low-mass galaxies and high-mass globular clusters.”
This figure from the study illustrates the star formation histories of each cluster, as well as each galaxy. In the top right, “The Firefly Sparkle and FF-BF both show a recent burst of star formation in the last ~ 50 Myr indicative of recent interactions,” the authors explain. Image Credit: Mowla et al. 2024.
Finding these ancient star clusters is intriguing, but we can’t assume they’ll survive intact. There are tidal and evaporative forces at work. The authors examined the stability of the individual star clusters and how they’ll fare over time.
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Very Large Telescope snaps gorgeous shot of Milky Way's star-studded core (photo)Samantha Mathewson joined Space.com as an intern in the summer of 2016. She received a B.A. in Journalism and Environmental Science at the University of New Haven, in Connecticut. Previously, her work has been published in Nature World News.
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