The James Webb Space Telescope is welcoming the New Year by creating spectacular images of bright flares in the depths of space. James Webb has recently recorded two grand spiral galaxies, one of which is the farthest identified to date.
The researchers have published papers on these galaxies on the arXiv preprint server. One is called A2744-GDSp-z4, the other, more distant, is called Zhulong, in honor of the Chinese red dragon deity. Both galaxies belong to the type of spiral galaxies characterized by well-defined arms. By comparison, our Milky Way is a diffuse spiral galaxy with a bar, although its structure is still being studied.
The galaxy A2744-GDSp-z4, which has a mass of about 14 billion solar masses, has an advanced structure for its age. It existed as early as 1.5 billion years after the Big Bang, indicating the early formation of spiral galaxies. It was discovered in the galaxy cluster Abell 2744, which was one of the first objects of the James Webb study.
Zhulong is the farthest known bulge-and-disk type galaxy with spiral arms.Its mass is similar to that of the Milky Way, but its star formation rate is relatively low – about 66 solar masses per year. This discovery is exciting because it proves that early galaxies were metal-poor and contained a lot of gas. Perhaps even large galaxies like Zhulong had limited resources for rapid star formation.
Spiral galaxies of grandiose design are located at vast distances, making them appear pixelated in James Webb’s images. Thanks to the gravitational lens effect, which bends and focuses the light of distant objects, the telescope is able to observe such distant structures. Images taken by instruments such as NIRCam (near-infrared camera) and MIRI (mid-infrared telescope) show different aspects of galaxies. NIRCam captures light from newly formed stars, while MIRI shows cold dust and gas.
James Webb continues to change the way we think about the early Universe and the evolution of galaxies. The telescope is able to see through gas clouds that obscure faint and distant light, allowing it to capture objects formed only a few hundred million years after the Big Bang. Over the past two years, James Webb has discovered numerous galaxies that are forcing us to rethink our ideas about the formation of the structure of the Universe in its earliest epochs.
Earlier we reported on how James Webb confirmed the discovery of the most distant galaxy in the Universe.
According to phys.org
