Scientists from the CEERS collaboration have identified an object, named Maisie’s galaxy after the daughter of project leader Steven Finkelstein, that may be one of the earliest galaxies ever observed. If its estimated redshift of 14 is confirmed by future observations, this would mean that we see it as only 290 million years after the Big Bang. Credit: NASA/STScI/CEERS/TACC/S. Finkelstein/M. Bagley/Z. Levay.
Two new images from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope show what could be one of the earliest galaxies ever observed. Both images include objects more than 13 billion years old, and one offers a much wider field of view than Webb’s First Deep Field image, which was released to great fanfare on July 12. The images represent some of the first in a large collaboration of astronomers and other academic researchers working with NASA and global partners to uncover new insights into the universe.
The team has identified a particularly exciting object, dubbed the Maisie Galaxy after the daughter of project leader Steven Finkelstein, which they estimate is being observed as it happened just 290 million years after the Big Bang (astronomers refer to this as a z=14 redshift). ).
The finding has been posted to the preprint server archiv and is pending publication in a peer-reviewed journal. If the finding is confirmed, it would be one of the earliest galaxies ever observed, and its presence would indicate that galaxies began forming much earlier than many astronomers thought.
The unprecedented images reveal a flurry of complex galaxies that evolve over time: some elegant mature pinwheels, some toddlers, others swirls of neighborly gauze doing the same. The images, which took about 24 hours to collect, come from a patch of sky near the handle of Ursa Major, a constellation formally called the Big Dipper. This same area of the sky was previously observed by the Hubble Space Telescope, as seen in the extended growth streak.
“It’s amazing to see a point of light from Hubble turn into an entire galaxy with a beautiful shape in these new James Webb images, and other galaxies appear out of thin air,” said Finkelstein, associate professor of astronomy at the University of Texas at The University of Texas. Austin and principal investigator of the Cosmic Evolution Early Release Science Survey (CEERS), from which these images were taken.
The CEERS collaboration consists of 18 co-investigators from 12 institutions and more than 100 collaborators from the US and nine other countries. CEERS researchers are studying how some of the earliest galaxies formed when the universe was less than 5% of its current age, during a period known as reionization.
Before the real data from the telescope arrived, Micaela Bagley, a postdoctoral researcher at UT Austin and one of the CEERS imagers, created simulated images to help the team develop methods to process and analyze the new images. Bagley led a group that processed the actual images so that the data could be analyzed by the entire team.
The large image is a mosaic of 690 individual frames that took about 24 hours to collect using the telescope’s main imager, called the Near Infrared Camera (NIRCam). This new image covers an area of the sky about eight times larger than Webb’s first deep field image, although it is not as deep. The researchers used supercomputers at the Texas Advanced Computing Center for initial image processing: Stampede2 was used to remove background noise and artifacts, and Frontera, the world’s most powerful supercomputer at a US university, was use to join the images to form a single mosaic. .
“The high-performance computing power made it possible to combine countless images and keep the frames in memory at the same time for processing, resulting in a single beautiful image,” said Finkelstein.
The other image was taken with the Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI). Compared to NIRcam, MIRI has a smaller field of view, but operates at a much higher spatial resolution than previous mid-infrared telescopes. MIRI detects longer wavelengths than NIRCam, allowing astronomers to see the bright cosmic dust from star-forming galaxies and black holes at modestly large distances, and to see light from older stars at very large distances .
The record for the most distant galaxy has just been broken again, now just 250 million years after the Big Bang More information: Steven L. Finkelstein et al, A Long Time Ago in a Galaxy Far, Far Away: A Candidate z ~ 14 Galaxy in Early JWST CEERS images, archiv (2022). arXiv:2207.12474 [astro-ph.GA]arxiv.org/abs/2207.12474 Journal Information: arXiv Provided by The University of Texas at Austin
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