James Webb Space Telescope looks back into the early universe, sees galaxies like our Milky Way
This simulation shows how stellar bars (left) and gas inflows driven by the bars (right) form. Star bars play an important role in the evolution of galaxies by funneling gas into the central regions of a galaxy, where it rapidly turns into new stars, typically 10 to 100 times faster than the rest of the galaxy. galaxy. The bars also indirectly help supermassive black holes to grow at the centers of galaxies by funneling gas part of the way. Credit: Francoise Combes, Paris Observatory
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“I took one look at these data, and I said, ‘We are dropping everything else!’” said Shardha Jogee, professor of astronomy at The University of Texas at Austin. “The bars hardly visible in Hubble data just popped out in the JWST image, showing the tremendous power of JWST to see the underlying structure in galaxies,” she said, describing data from the Cosmic Evolution Early Release Science Survey (CEERS), led by UT Austin professor, Steven Finkelstein.
The power of JWST to map galaxies at high resolution and at longer infrared wavelengths than Hubble allows it look through dust and unveil the underlying structure and mass of distant galaxies. This can be seen in these two images of the galaxy EGS23205, seen as it was about 11 billion years ago. In the HST image (left, taken in the near-infrared filter), the galaxy is little more than a disk-shaped smudge obscured by dust and impacted by the glare of young stars, but in the corresponding JWST mid-infrared image (taken this past summer), it’s a beautiful spiral galaxy with a clear stellar bar. Credit: NASA/CEERS/University of Texas at Austin
The team identified another barred galaxy, EGS-24268, also from about 11 billion years ago, which makes two barred galaxies existing farther back in time than any previously discovered.
In an article accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, they highlight these two galaxies and show examples of four other barred galaxies from more than 8 billion years ago.
“For this study, we are looking at a new regime where no one had used this kind of data or done this kind of quantitative analysis before,” said Yuchen “Kay” Guo, a graduate student who led the analysis, “so everything is new. It’s like going into a forest that nobody has ever gone into.”
Bars play an important role in galaxy evolution by funneling gas into the central regions, boosting star formation.
“Bars solve the supply chain problem in galaxies,” Jogee said. “Just like we need to bring raw material from the harbor to inland factories that make new products, a bar powerfully transports gas into the central region where the gas is rapidly converted into new stars at a rate typically 10 to 100 times faster than in the rest of the galaxy.”
Bars also help to grow supermassive black holes in the centers of galaxies by channeling the gas part of the way.
This simulation shows how stellar bars (left) and gas inflows driven by the bars (right) form. Star bars play an important role in the evolution of galaxies by funneling gas into the central regions of a galaxy, where it rapidly turns into new stars, typically 10 to 100 times faster than the rest of the galaxy. galaxy. The bars also indirectly help supermassive black holes to grow at the centers of galaxies by funneling gas part of the way. Credit: Francoise Combes, Paris Observatory
The discovery of bars during such early times shakes up galaxy evolution scenarios in several ways.
“This discovery of the first bars means that models of galaxy evolution now have a new path through the bars to accelerate the production of new stars at early epochs,” Jogee said.
And the very existence of these early bars defies theoretical models, since they need to get the physics of the galaxy right to predict the correct abundance of bars. The team will test different models in their next articles.
Montage of JWST images showing six examples of barred galaxies, two of which represent the highest retrospective times identified and quantitatively characterized to date. The labels at the top left of each figure show the time back of each galaxy, ranging from 8.4 to 11 billion years ago (Gyr), when the universe was only 40% to 20% full. current age. Credit: NASA/CEERS/The University of Texas at Austin
JWST can reveal structures in distant galaxies better than Hubble for two reasons: First, its larger mirror gives it greater light-gathering ability, allowing it to see farther and with higher resolution. Second, it can see through the dust better, since it observes at longer infrared wavelengths than Hubble.
Undergraduate students Eden Wise and Zilei Chen played a key role in the research by visually reviewing hundreds of galaxies, looking for those that appeared to have bars, helping to narrow the list down to a few dozen for other researchers to analyze with a more intensive mathematical approach. Getting closer.
Reference: “First Look at Z > 1 Bars in the Near-Infrared Resting Frame with JWST Early CEERS Imaging” by Yuchen Guo, Shardha Jogee, Steven L. Finkelstein, Zilei Chen, Eden Wise, Micaela B. Bagley, Guillermo Barro , 2010 Stijn Wuyts, Dale D. Kocevski, Jeyhan S. Kartaltepe, Elizabeth J. McGrath, Henry C. Ferguson, Bahram Mobasher, Mauro Giavalisco, Ray A. Lucas, George A. Zavala, Jennifer M. Lotz, Norman A. Grogin , Marc Gardens-Company, Jesus Vega-Ferrero, Nimish P. Hathi, Pablo Arrabal Haro, Mark Dickinson, Anton M. Koekemoer, Casey Papovich, Nor Pirzkal, LY Aaron Yung, Bren E. Backhaus, Eric F. Bell, Antonello Calabrò , Nikko J. Cleri, Rosemary T. Coogan, MC Cooper, Luca Costantin, Darren Croton, Kelcey Davis, Alexander de la Vega, Avishai Dekel, Maximilian Franco, Jonathan P. Gardner, Benne W. Holwerda, Taylor A. Hutchison, Viraj Pandya, Pablo G. Perez-Gonzalez, Swara Ravindranath, Caitlin Rose, Jonathan R. Trump, and Weichen Wang, Accepted, The letters of the astrophysical journal.
arXiv:2210.08658
Other UT Austin coauthors include Steven Finkelstein, Micaela Bagley, and Maximilien Franco. Dozens of co-authors from other institutions come from the US, UK, Japan, Spain, France, Italy, Australia, and Israel.
Funding for this research was provided in part by the Roland K. Blumberg Endowment in Astronomy, the Heising-Simons Foundation, and NASA. This work drew on the resources of the Texas Advanced Computing Center, including Frontera, the most powerful supercomputer at a US university.