Since NASA finally launched the James Webb Telescope (JWST) into space last Christmas after a long series of delays, Hubble’s successor never ceases to amaze us. A few days ago, we spoke about Webb’s discovery of a collision between two galaxies that gives birth to new stars.
The next-generation telescope is now the star of the cosmic show once again, as it led to the discovery of the oldest star clusters in the Universe, thanks to the new work of a team of Canadian astronomers, according to The Astrophysical Journal Letters.
Millions of stars compacted into globular clusters
In the new study that also involved scientists from the Faculty of Arts & Science of the University of Toronto, it has been revealed that millions of stars are located in the newfound globular clusters.
???? Oldest star clusters in the universe A team of Canadian astronomers, including experts from the Dunlap Institute for Astronomy & Astrophysics in the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Arts & Science, have used the James Webb Telescope… https://t.co/sCuesaO6Dz
— SpaceTime (@stuartgary) November 2, 2022
The researchers focused on the so-called “Sparkler Galaxy” from the First Deep Field Image of James Webb. That’s a galaxy located 9 billion light-years away.
Kartheik G. Iyer, a co-lead author of the new study and also a post-doctoral researcher at the Dunlap Institute for Astronomy & Astrophysics, stated as Phys.org quotes:
Looking at the first images from JWST and discovering old globular clusters around distant galaxies was an incredible moment—one that wasn’t possible with previous Hubble Space Telescope imaging,
Since we could observe the sparkles across a range of wavelengths, we could model them and better understand their physical properties—like how old they are and how many stars they contain. We hope the knowledge that globular clusters can be observed at from such great distances with JWST will spur further science and searches for similar objects.
It is generally accepted in astrophysics that the Universe needed about a hundred million years after the Big Bang to give birth to its first stars. In other words, it was total darkness until that moment, except for the blinding flash of light generated by the Big Bang when our Universe was just a few fractions of a second old.
