The most powerful telescope ever launched into space has made history by detecting a record number of new stars in a distant galaxy.
of NASA The James Webb Space TelescopeIt captured a unique image that revealed 44 individual stars in a galaxy 6.5 billion light-years from the Milky Way, according to a paper published Monday. Nature Astronomy.
Astronomers used Webb’s high-resolution optics and distortion in space to reveal the existence of dozens of previously unknown stars, researchers said. The detection of a “treasure” of stars was possible because the light of the 44 new stars was magnified in front of them by a large galaxy cluster, called Abell 370. Astrophysics Center.
It is known as technique gravitational lensthat’s when a massive amount of matter — like a cluster of galaxies — creates a gravitational field that distorts and magnifies the light of distant galaxies that are behind it but in the same line of sight, according to NASA. The effect is basically like looking through a giant magnifying glass.
Abell 370 galaxy cluster.
NASA
The powerful gravitational magnification allowed astronomers to detect faint background sources and study their internal structures, which could lead to the identification of individual stars in distant galaxies, according to the paper.
Gravitational lensing is also known as the “Einstein Ring” because the famous physicist Albert Einstein predicted this possibility in his theory of general relativity.
A visible arc created by gravitational lensing and the bending of light beyond Abell 370 was called the “Dragon Arc”. After carefully examining the colors of each star within the Arc, researchers have discovered that many are red supergiants, stars in the final stages of life.
The finding contrasts with previous findings that primarily identified blue supergiants, which are among the brightest stars in the night sky, according to the Center for Astrophysics.
In the Milky Way and nearby galaxies, such as the Andromeda Galaxy, astronomers can observe stars individually. But for galaxies billions of light years away, the stars appear jumbled together because of the distance.
“To us, very distant galaxies usually look like a fuzzy, fuzzy ball,” lead author Yoshinobu Fudamoto, an assistant professor at Chiba University in Japan, said in a statement.
Gravitational lensing diagram. This diagram shows how light rays from a distant galaxy or star can be bent by the gravity of an intervening galaxy cluster. As a result, an observer on Earth sees the distant object as brighter than it would appear without gravitational lensing.
NASA, ESA, Ann Feild (STScI), Frank Summers (STScI)
The Astrophysics Center He likened the prospect of finding individual stars halfway across the observable universe to “lifting binoculars to the moon in hopes of picking out individual grains of dust inside its craters.” The discovery happened by chance because the astronomers were looking for a background galaxy but found individual stars, according to Fengwu Sun, a postdoctoral researcher at the Center for Astrophysics and co-author of the study.
“This ground-breaking discovery proves, for the first time, that it is possible to study large numbers of stars in a distant galaxy,” said Sun. “We now have the ability to fix stars that were beyond our ability.”
Launched on December 25, 2021, the Webb telescope orbits the Sun 1 million kilometers from Earth and collects data to help astronomers study every phase of the universe’s history, from the Big Bang to the formation of life-sustaining solar systems. , according to NASA.
NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, which orbits the Earth, has previously detected seven stars.
This dragon-like feature is the only spiral galaxy to appear in multiple locations side by side in an arc.
NASA
The Webb telescope’s historic discovery will allow future astronomers to investigate “one of the universe’s greatest mysteries — dark matter,” according to the Center for Astrophysics.
“Observing more individual stars will help us better understand the dark matter in the lensing plane of these galaxies and stars, which we couldn’t do with just a few previously observed stars,” Sun said.
Future Webb telescope observations are expected to capture more massive stars in the Dragon’s Arc galaxy, according to the Center for Astrophysics.
