by The James Webb Space Telescope (Webb or JWST) has discovered several rare red spiral galaxies, giving astronomers a new look at the early Universe.
Astronomers analyzed the red spiral galaxies in one of the James Webb Space Telescope, the first image of the galaxy cluster SMACS J0723.3–7327. Seen through the eyes of the JWST, the most powerful telescope ever put into orbit, the galaxy cluster magnifies objects seen beyond and allows astronomers to peer deeper into the Earth universe. The researchers found that some of these galaxies represent the most distant spiral galaxies ever seen.
The red spiral galaxies themselves are not new discoveries: NASA is retired Spitzer Space Telescope they pictured in the past. But Spitzer didn’t have the power of JWST and couldn’t see the details of the shape of the galaxies, which astronomers call morphology. The shape of galaxies tells the story of their evolution, so the intricate details of these galaxies’ morphology provided by JWST could greatly improve our understanding of the early Universe.
gallery: The first photos from the James Webb Space Telescope
Additionally, a particular galaxy hidden in the image could alter our perception of the galactic population that existed during that period of cosmic history. In the image, astronomers spotted a red spiral galaxy in the early Universe that is “passive,” or non-star forming. The discovery is surprising because astronomers expected galaxies in the early Universe to be actively giving birth to stars.
“Whereas these galaxies have already been discovered in the previous observations made by NASAs Hubble Space Telescope and Spitzer Space Telescope, their limited spatial resolution and/or sensitivity did not allow us to study their detailed shapes and properties,” said Yoshinobu Fudamoto, a junior researcher at Waseda University in Japan and first author of the new research, in a expression.
Spiral galaxies are extremely common in the cosmic neighborhood around the Milky Way, but red spiral galaxies are much rarer, accounting for only 2% of the galaxies in the local Universe. The discovery of red spiral galaxies in the early Universe, from observations covering a relatively insignificant fraction of space, suggests that these rare galaxies were much more common in the early Universe.
Astronomers have found that the two most extreme red galaxies, RS13 and RS14, appear as they appeared 8 to 10 billion years ago, quite early in the 13.8 billion year lifetime of the universe. The two galaxies are also the most distant and earliest spiral galaxies known to date.
And the fact that RS14 is a passive galaxy that no longer forms Stars only makes the discovery more intriguing because its existence suggests that non-star-forming galaxies may be more common in the early Universe than astronomers thought.
“Our study showed for the first time that passive spiral galaxies could be abundant in the early Universe,” Fudamoto said. “While this paper is a pilot study of spiral galaxies in the early Universe, the confirmation and extension of this study would greatly impact our understanding of the formation and evolution of galactic morphologies.”
The team’s research is published in The Letters of the Astrophysical Journal.
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