The James Webb Space Telescope has captured what appear to be two “halos” of dark matter in a region where a “knot” of galaxies is forming around the nucleus of an active, hyper-bright galaxy that joined 11.5 billion years ago, RT reports.
The telescope obtained an image of three compact galaxies, orbiting each other at high speeds, which is possible only if there is a large amount of mass.
Astronomers think the cluster is “two massive dark matter halos merging together.”
And dark matter, although it is believed to make up 80% of the universe, has never been directly detected, but the study by the University of Heidelberg in Germany indicates that James Webb “is likely to search in the dense medium the core of the enormous dark matter halo.”
The international team of scientists made this surprising discovery when they used the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) to peer billions of years into the distant past.
This discovery represents an opportunity to observe how the first galaxies merged to form the universe as we see it today.
The extremely bright quasar and the extremely red quasar, known as SDSS J165202.64 + 172852.3, are about 11.5 billion years old, and they are one of the most powerful quasars seen from such a great distance, according to scientists, who described it as a black hole in the formation stage.
The quasar — the hot gaseous region immediately surrounding a supermassive black hole — reaches several hundred thousand degrees Celsius and emits light and other rays, an astronomical radio source.
Previous observations of this region of space, using the Hubble Space Telescope and the Gemini-North Telescope in Hawaii, have revealed the quasar and hinted at a transition galaxy, but further observations using the James Webb Telescope have revealed at least three galaxies in orbit. Quasar..
This discovery was made possible only by James Webb’s ability to look back in time, allowing him to see how the first galaxies formed and evolved.
James Webb’s images of the region showed that the three galaxies were moving at astounding speeds, indicating the presence of enormous mass, leading the team to believe that it might be the densest region of galaxies seen in the early universe. Because the quasar that orbits it formed only two billion years after its launch, the Big Bang that occurred 13.8 billion years ago.