JWST has spotted three tiny, distant galaxies that could solve a long-standing cosmic mystery.
; as the Universe expands, its most distant galaxies appear to shift out of the visible part of the electromagnetic spectrum and into the infrared. Of the thousands of galaxies in the SMACS 0723 image, researchers decided to make follow-up spectroscopic observations of three that looked as though they might be especially far away.
The emissions spectra of green pea galaxies are similar to those of galaxies from the early Universe, spotted by JWST.But when James Rhoads, an astronomer at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and his colleagues first saw the trio’s spectra, they realized that the galaxies looked like objects normally found nearby.
Green peas have fascinated astronomers because, even though they have been observed only in the nearby Universe, their properties resemble those expected for early galaxies. The first galaxies, for example, are thought to contain only light elements because heavy elements need time to form. Sangeeta Malhotra, an astronomer at Goddard Space Flight Center, joked at the AAS meeting on 12 January that they are “Peter Pan galaxies” because they haven’t matured.
Thuan says he was “amazed” to see the similarity between the spectra that JWST took of these galaxies and those of green peas, which he has long studied. There is little doubt that they are the same type of object. Before JWST, researchers had measured green peas from ten billion years after the Big Bang, says Daniel Schaerer, an astronomer at the University of Geneva in Switzerland. “And now suddenly we can do the same thing — but just 700 million years after the Big Bang. It’s completely mind-boggling.”
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