Using the James Webb Space Telescope, scientists have discovered that the universe’s early galaxies must have grown much faster than expected. In addition, the same team also found that 10 billion years ago, the universe was not as chaotic as previously thought.
An international team led by researchers from Durham University in the UK came to these conclusions by discovering evidence of structures called “stellar bars” in galaxies that existed only a few billion years after the Big Bang.
Stellar bars are elongated regions of increased stellar density found at the heart of spiral galaxies such as the Milky Way and other plate galaxies. As stellar bars form, they push gas into the hearts of their respective galaxies, thereby regulating the birth of stars. Therefore, the presence of these central bar structures indicates that a galaxy has entered a more settled and “mature stage”.
Related: The James Webb Space Telescope finds dwarf galaxies that are a handful enough to reshape the entire early universe.
“Galaxies in the early universe are maturing much faster than we thought,” Zoe Le Conte, team leader and researcher at Durham University, said in a statement. This is a real surprise, because you’d expect the universe to be very turbulent at that point, with lots of collisions between galaxies and lots of gas that hasn’t turned into stars yet.
However, thanks to JWST, we see many of these bars much earlier in the life of the universe, meaning that galaxies were at a more stable stage in their evolution than previously thought. “Perspectives on the Early Evolution of Galaxies.”
Load-jump for the James Webb Space Telescope
This is not the first time that scientists have delved into the early 13.8 billion year history of the universe.
The Hubble Space Telescope also witnessed these features, but that world-wide eye could only go back 8 to 9 billion years. However, JWST’s increased sensitivity and wavelength range have pushed such observations back at least another 1 billion years. This has revealed the formation of bars in galaxies seen between 8 and 11.5 billion years ago. In fact, of the 368 disc galaxies the team considered for the study, 20 percent already had bars.
In the sense that double The number observed by Hubble
“We found that there were many more bars than previously found in Hubble studies, suggesting that the evolution of core galaxies took much longer than previously thought,” said team member Dimitri Gadotti of Durham University. has happened.” “The fact that there are so many more bars is what’s so exciting.”
The further back the team looked with JWST, they saw fewer barred structures in the galaxies.
They believe this could be because galaxies were not well formed in the early stages of the universe. An alternative might be that shorter bars were more common in older galaxies. Even the impressive observational power of JWST is not enough to see these short bars in early galaxies.
With these results in hand, the team now wants to use JWST to probe further into cosmic time, looking back 12.2 billion years. This could reveal whether bar growth was common just 1.6 billion years after the Big Bang.
“The Universe simulations now need to be scrutinized to see if we get results similar to the observations we made with JWST,” Gadotty concluded. “We have to think outside of what we thought we knew.”
The team’s research was published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
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