A team of astronomers from Wellesley College has taken stunning new images showing a newly forming galaxy resembling a young Milky Way. The study was published in the journal Nature.
Image Credit: Wellesley College
The stunning pictures, captured by NASA's James Webb Space Telescope, depict a galaxy that gleams with ten different star clusters that formed at various points in time, resembling the Milky Way.
The newly found galaxy, which the Wellesley team has named the “Firefly Sparkle,” was forming about 600 million years after the Big Bang, while the galaxy was starting to take shape. It was cocooned in a diffuse arc and looked like fireflies “dancing” on a summer night.
The mass of the Firefly Sparkle is comparable to what the Milky Way's mass may have been at the same stage of development. Mowla says the discovery is especially significant.
These remarkable images give us an unprecedented picture of what our own galaxy might have looked like when it was being born. By examining these photos of the Firefly Sparkle, we can better understand how our own Milky Way took shape.
Lamiya Mowla, Astronomer, Wellesley College
According to Mowla, there are no other glimpses of a young galaxy forming in such a manner as its own. A Milky Way-like galaxy in the early stages of its formation in a universe that is only 600 million years old is depicted in the JWST images.
As an observational astronomer studying the structural evolution of astronomical objects in the early Universe, I want to understand how the first stars, star clusters, galaxies, and galaxy clusters formed in the infant Universe and how they changed as the Universe got older.
Lamiya Mowla, Astronomer, Wellesley College
Of the Firefly Sparkle, she said, “I did not think it would be possible to resolve a galaxy that existed so early in the universe into so many distinct components, let alone find that its mass is similar to our own galaxy’s when it was in the process of forming.”
There is so much going on inside this tiny galaxy, including so many different phases of star formation. These images are the very first glimpse of something that we will be able to study and learn from for many years to come.
Lamiya Mowla, Astronomer, Wellesley College
Mowla, Assistant Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Wellesley and a 2013 college graduate, co-led the project with Kartheik Iyer, a NASA Hubble Fellow at Columbia University in New York.
Journal Reference
Mowla, L., et al. (2024) Formation of a low-mass galaxy from star clusters in a 600-million-year-old Universe. Nature. doi.org/10.1038/s41586-024-08293-0.