Webb’s capture of AzTECC71. (Image Credit: J McKinney/M Franco/C Casey/The University of Texas at Austin).
The James Webb Space Telescope has spotted a dusty galaxy from the early universe, designated as AzTECC71, that had first been identified using ground based telescopes, but was missing in images captured by the Hubble Space Telescope. The galaxy has plenty of star forming material, and is furiously forming new stars. The infrared gaze of Webb was particularly suited to peer through the obscuring cloud of gas and dust surrounding the galaxy, which is the raw material for star formation. The galaxy is one among about dozen of dusty galaxy candidates from the early universe. These galaxies were once believed to be extremely rare, but the new observations indicate that they may be 10 times more common than previous estimates.
The galaxy was spotted as part of the COSMOS-Web survey, which aims to map one million galaxies from the young universe, to investigate the large scale structures that emerged at the dawn of time. The team is comprised of 50 researchers who have been allocated 250 hours of precious observations on Webb. Scientists refer to these ghost galaxies from the early universe as Hubble-dark galaxies, as the galaxies are not readily visible in optical frequencies that Hubble uses to gaze into the cosmos. The researchers intend to hunt down many more such galaxies using Webb.
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A paper describing the findings has been published in The Astrophysical Journal. One of the study authors, Jed McKinney says, “This thing is a real monster. Even though it looks like a little blob, it’s actually forming hundreds of new stars every year. And the fact that even something that extreme is barely visible in the most sensitive imaging from our newest telescope is so exciting to me. It’s potentially telling us there’s a whole population of galaxies that have been hiding from us.” The writing on the wall is that the early universe was far dustier than scientists believed.
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Shambhu Kumar is a science communicator, making complex scientific topics accessible to all. His articles explore breakthroughs in various scientific disciplines, from space exploration to cutting-edge research.
