Space and astronomy news
A central oval identifies the Firefly Sparkle galaxy, which is similar to a young Milky Way. Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, C. Willott , L. Mowla , K. Iyer
What was the Milky Way like billions of years ago? One way we can find out is by looking at the most distant galaxies in the observable Universe. Seeing those far galaxies is one goal of the James Webb Space Telescope. It has revealedMost of the galaxies Webb has observed so far have been larger than we expected, which led to some speculation that perhaps the Big Bang was wrong, which isn’t the case.
The galaxy has been nicknamed Firefly Sparkle, and we see it from a time when the Universe was just 600 million years old. Its light traveled for more than 13 billion years to reach us and would have been too dim even for Webb to see were it not for a trick of light. Since Firefly Sparkle is behind a large cluster of galaxies, its light is gravitationally lensed.
. In this case, the foreground galaxy cluster magnified the light of Firefly Sparkle making it bright enough for Webb to see.Gravitational lensing also highly distorts our view of a distant galaxy, so astronomers have to trace the paths of light to reconstruct the true shape of the galaxy. Normally, that would be a problem, but in this case, the distortion was a surprise blessing. Rather than appearing as a single fuzzy blob, Firefly Sparkle appears as a string of glowing jewels.
From the clumps of star-forming regions, the team could also estimate the overall mass of Firefly Sparkle, which is very similar to the hypothetical mass of the Milky Way at that age. The young galaxy even has a couple of companion dwarf galaxies, similar to the Magellanic clouds of the Milky Way. Overall, this gives us a much better understanding of how our galaxy might have formed.
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