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The Web space telescope is ushering in the New Year in the same fashion as us humans, capturing images of bursts of bright color in the sky. Well, not “in the sky”—the Web itself is a million miles from Earth, and its targets are even farther away. But the Advanced Space Observatory recently imaged two grand design spiral galaxies, and one appears to be the most distant yet detected.
Researchers have written papers on two giant spiral galaxies, both currently to host On the preprint server arXiv. One of the oldest galaxies is called A2744-GDSp-z4; The other—more distant—is called Zhulong, after the red dragon god in Chinese mythology. Both spiral galaxies are newly discovered and Grand Design Spiral GalaxyA type of spiral galaxy with very well defined arms. Spiral galaxies with less defined arms are called flocculent spiral galaxies. For reference, our Milky Way is one Barred spiral galaxyHowever, researchers continue to search for its exact structure What label is most appropriate for it.
A2744-GDSp-z4 (sorry, no funny nickname) can be seen below in Webb’s composite image. The galaxy weighs about 14 billion solar masses and has a surprisingly advanced structure for its age. The existence of galaxies indicates that well-pronounced spiral galaxies existed even 1.5 billion years after the Big Bang—arguably, early in the universe’s existence. Although the spiral arms may not be completely clear to our eyes, you can make out the general shape, especially in the image on the left. The galaxy was found in the galaxy cluster Abel 2744, one of the Webb Early scientific goals and which have yielded before Likewise distant galaxies.
Zhúlong, pictured in pink at the top of this article, is “the most distant bulge + disc galaxy with a spiral arm known to date,” according to the paper. It has a mass similar to that of the Milky Way (which is above average for this type of early galaxy) and a relatively low star formation rate. The Grand-Design spiral is producing about 66 solar masses per year. That finding is interesting when combined with previous Webb Telescope data indicated Ancient galaxies were metal-poor and very gaseous. Perhaps Zhúlong, despite its size, lacked the right resources for a rapid rate of star formation.
The best grand-design spirals are extremely distant, which is why they appear so pixelated in web images. Part of the reason the Web can see such remote objects is that it uses Gravitational lens— regions of spacetime with such intense gravity that they bend light, allowing us to see objects behind them. When light is bent, it is refocused—magnified—for a telescope like Webb.
In other words, even though massive galaxies appear like smoke, the images are amazing and the web is working perfectly normally. Nearby galaxies imaged by telescopes appear in much sharper relief. Below is a slider showing how web tools reveal different aspects of a grand design spiral galaxy. The image on the left was taken by Webb’s Near-Infrared Camera, or NIRCam, while the image on the right was taken by MIRI, the telescope’s mid-infrared imager. NIRCam captures warm light from newly formed stars, while MIRI captures galaxy light that comes from cold grains of dust and gas. The galaxy shown here is much sharper than the ancient galaxies discussed in this article because it is much closer, only 27 million light years away.
The web continues to shake up our understanding of the early universe with galactic evolution, made possible by the telescope’s remarkable insights. Webb can see through massive gas clouds that otherwise obscure even the faintest and most distant light, allowing researchers to image objects in the early universe. In the past two years, the Web Illustrated galaxy That formed only a few hundred million years ago After the Big Bang And raised new questions About how those structures unfolded over deep time.
