The Webb telescope appears to have captured the light of a star 13 billion years ago… The result of an initial analysis

Researchers “Possibility of a very early globular cluster, about 500 million years after the birth of the universe”

A global cluster of distant galaxies, including the oldest known very early star, was captured by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), researchers at the University of Toronto in Canada announced on the 29th (local time).

As a result of capturing and analyzing signals from globular clusters with JWST, the researchers explain that they may contain early stars that shone around 500 million years after the birth of the universe, that is, 13 billion years ago or’ n earlier.

This is much older than our Sun which formed around 4.6 billion years ago.

According to the University of Toronto in Canada and the American Astronomical Society (AAS), researchers from the University’s Dunlab Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics, including Dr. Ramiya Moula and Dr.

This is the result of an initial analysis of the ‘Webb’s First Deep Field’ image released to the public by NASA on July 11 this year.

The researchers explain that it could be information about some of the earliest galaxies that appeared in the universe.

The research team comprehensively analyzed the data collected by the ‘Near Infrared Camera’ (NIRCam) and ‘Near Infrared Imager and Slitless Spectroscopy’ (NIRISS) devices published in JWST and old Hubble Space Telescope (HST) data in the past. I came to a conclusion.

“The purpose of the JWST is to discover the first stars and the first galaxies, and to help us understand what is the source of complexity in the universe, such as chemical elements and the basic units that create life,” said Moula who did.

“This discovery, made in the first deep field of the web, already provides detailed information about the earliest stages of star formation,” he said.

The researchers focused on a specific part of the first deep field images on the web.

This is the visible part of the galaxy, which the researchers have decided to call the ‘sparkler’.

This galaxy is about 9 billion light years away.

When observing with JWST, it was not clear who the bright yellow and red (sparkling) dots that could be seen around it were.

Researchers believe that these sparkles could be in the form of clusters of young stars that are actively forming stars 3 billion years after the beginning of the universe, the Big Bang, or globular clusters of very old stars.

A globular cluster is a dense cluster of tens to tens of millions of stars formed from the early days of galaxies, and it contains information that can be a clue to the early formation and growth of galaxies.

There are about 150 globular clusters in our galaxy, but it is not known exactly when they were formed.

Analyzing 12 of the points around the ‘Sparkler Galaxy’, the researchers explain that five of them appear to belong to the oldest known globular clusters.

This is the first time that very distant globular clusters have been used to estimate the age of the earliest stars in distant galaxies.

“It was an amazing moment to look at the first images from JWST and find old globular clusters around distant galaxies,” said Dr Ayr. There are.”

However, the estimate of ‘about 500 million years after the Big Bang, 13 billion years ago or earlier’ comes from early analysis, so it’s hard to say very definitely.

The paper containing the results of this study was published on the 29th in ‘The Astrophysical Journal Letters’, an academic journal published by AAS.

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