2024-02-04 23:22:32
Monday, February 5, 2024 01:22 am
Monday, February 5, 2024 01:22 am
A team of astronomers discovered a galaxy that appeared in photography James telescope It was not the primary observation target. Galaxies are connected to each other by gravity and consist of stars and planets, with huge clouds of dust and gas in addition to dark matter. As for dwarf galaxies like this discovered galaxy, they are the most abundant galaxies in the universe, and by definition they are small with Low luminosity, containing less than 100 million stars, while the Milky Way, for example, has approximately 200 billion stars.
According to Phys, recent dwarf galaxy observations of an abundance of “ultra-diffusive galaxies” that exceed the range of previous large spectroscopic surveys suggest that our understanding of dwarf galaxy populations may be incomplete.
The dwarf galaxy, PEARLSDG, appeared in some of the team’s JWST images. It wasn’t the target at all, but rather it was a little far from the main field of observation, in a region of space where they didn’t expect to see anything. Their findings were published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.
PEARLSDG doesn’t have the usual properties of a dwarf galaxy one would expect to see: It’s not interacting with a nearby galaxy, but it’s also not forming new stars, and as it turns out, it’s an interesting case of a quiet, isolated galaxy.
“These types of isolated, quiet dwarf galaxies have never been seen before except in relatively few cases, and they are not really expected to exist given our current understanding of galaxy evolution, so the fact that we are seeing this object helps us improve our theories,” said Tim Carlton, assistant research scientist at Arizona State University. About galaxy formation.
Individual stars can be observed in the JWST images taken by the team, and these stars are brightest at JWST wavelengths; It is one of the farthest galaxies in which we can see these stars with this level of detail, and the brightness of these stars allows astronomers to measure the distance separating them from Earth, which amounts to 98 million light-years.
Carlton and his team used a wide range of data, including imaging data from JWST’s Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam); Spectroscopic data from the DeVeney Optical Spectrograph on the Lowell Discovery Telescope in Arizona; Archival photography from NASA’s GALEX and Spitzer space telescopes; And ground-based imaging from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey and Dark Energy Camera Legacy Survey.
JWST’s NIRCam has very high angular resolution and sensitivity, allowing the team to identify individual stars in this distant galaxy.
Importantly, identifying specific stars in imaging provided a key clue to their distance. These stars have a specific intrinsic brightness, so by measuring their apparent brightness using the James Webb Space Telescope, the team was able to determine how far away they were. It turned out that these stars were among the most distant stars of their kind that could be observed.
Source : Technology News: A team of astronomers discovers a galaxy that should not exist
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