Tangles of huge organic molecules are drifting through a faraway galaxy
Credit: J. Spilker/S. Doyle, NASA, ESA, CSAhave discovered. Scientists have never spotted such molecules so far from Earth, and their presence suggests that their host galaxy was busy creating stars early in the history of the Universe.. “It must have basically formed on overdrive,” says Justin Spilker, an astronomer at Texas A&M University in College Station..
Earlier studies of SPT0418-47 had spotted areas where stars might have been forming, but could not detect PAHs. The molecules are hard to spot except in infrared wavelengths of light, which JWST excels at studying. So Spilker’s team pointed the telescope at the galaxy last August, in what were some of its first science observations. Months later, they finally had the data processed, and the PAHs emerged.
Regardless, the PAHs suggest that the galaxy was busy making stars early in the Universe’s history. At a time when the Universe was just 10 percent of its current age, SPT0418-47 already had a mass similar to that of today’s Milky Way.. But seeing PAHs in this distant galaxy is an important clue to how these molecules form, says Karin Sandstrom, an astronomer at the University of California San Diego.
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