The "Firefly" galaxy, discovered by the James Webb Space Telescope, existed just 600 million years after the Big Bang—with a mass similar to the young Milky Way. Gravitational lensing has enabled unprecedented observations of early star formation and clusters
A glimpse into the early universe
The James Webb Space Telescope has discovered and measured the mass of a distant galaxy that existed just 600 million years after the Big Bang. The newly identified galaxy, named Firefly Sparkle, may resemble the Milky Way as it appeared in its earliest stages of formation.
The firefly's twinkle is dotted with ten bright star clusters, which could provide clues about how early galaxies formed. Scientists believe that galaxies began as fragmented star clusters, some of which evolved into the globular clusters we see today.
Roberto Abraham, a professor of astronomy and astrophysics at the University of Toronto who played a key role in the discovery, shared insights into the significance of the findings for the earliest galaxies in the universe:
How does Webb's observation of the firefly's twinkle help us understand things about the universe that we didn't know before?
Webb’s resolution and sensitivity allow us to study very distant objects—like those bright star clusters that first drew our attention to the Firefly galaxy—in sharp detail. We can also focus in because of a natural phenomenon called strong gravitational lensing. In this case, a foreground galaxy cluster magnified the glow of the Firefly galaxy behind it, acting like a giant magnifying glass.
With the Web, we can go back in time and look at distant objects like the Firefly's twinkle and see objects within it that may be younger globular clusters, which today appear as dense groups of millions of ancient stars. It's crazy to see things that are ancient today formed in the distant past. When you see ten of them formed in this way, the Firefly's twinkle becomes a tremendous source for understanding the earliest stages of galaxy formation and evolution.
From Webb's images and data, the researchers concluded that the firefly's twinkle has the same mass as our Milky Way galaxy would have if we could "turn back time" to weigh it when its parts were assembled? Why is it important to know the "weight" of the firefly's twinkle?
It gives us a glimpse into the mass of young galaxies when the universe was very young. Today's galaxies are much more massive. We already knew that, but Webb allows us to understand how they became more massive, and how they get so many stars inside them. In some models, stars are formed slowly through internal processes, while in other models they are formed in small galaxies that collide together and grow. From galaxies like the Firefly Twinkle, we learn that both things happen, but the second process seems to be dominant.
In 2022, a team of scientists used the Web to identify the most distant known globular clusters, in what they called the "Shining Galaxy" (Sparkler galaxy). How does this new discovery build on the previous one?
The tiny points of light – the “sparkles” – seen in the twinkling galaxy we studied in 2022 were four billion years old when their light was emitted, similar to the age of the universe at the time. Nine billion years later, in today’s universe, we know exactly what they looked like: the globular clusters of today. The new Firefly twinkle galaxy brings us closer to the starting point of evolution, so we’re not XNUMX percent sure what the tiny points of light in the galaxy evolved into.
Looking at a sparkling galaxy is like looking at a small child: you can be pretty sure that a child will eventually grow up to look like an adult. But looking at a firefly's sparkle is like looking at a fetus: all kinds of animals have embryos that look similar, so in this case it's less clear what those sparkles will become.
What are the following things you plan to search for on the web?
We need to find more examples of systems that are similar to the Sparkling Galaxies and the Firefly Flicker to be completely sure that these little points of light in the Firefly Flicker are indeed very young globular clusters. What we have today is an amazing starting point!
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Maybe you know. I can't figure out if the light from the early galaxy undergoes gravitational lensing. This means that there are large star clusters that create the gravitational lensing that have already had time to form and settle between the galaxy and us since the light from the galaxy came out, but how is this possible if all matter originated in the Big Bang near the time the galaxy was born. It's as if the matter in the universe moved faster than light.