The James Webb Space Telescope captured an image of the oldest "dead" galaxy and provided one of the deepest views into the distant universe made with the observatory to date.
The galaxy in question is said to have existed when the universe was only about 700 million years into its current age of roughly 13.8 billion years. However, an unknown factor made the galaxy suddenly stop forming stars nearly as quickly as star birth had begun more than 13 billion years ago.
James Webb Observes Oldest "Dead" Galaxy
A recent report describing the discovery appeared on Wednesday in the journal Nature. The authors said that studying this particular galaxy could reveal a slew of new insights regarding the early universe and the factors that affect star formation with galaxies.
In a statement, the lead author of the study, Tobias Looser, said that the first few hundred million years of the universe was considered to be an active phase. He noted that there were lots of gas clouds that collapsed to form new stars, as per CNN.
Looser, who is a doctoral student in extragalactic astrophysics at the University of Cambridge's Kavli Institute for Cosmology, said that galaxies need a rich supply of gas in order to form new stars. He noted that the early universe was like an "all-you-can-eat buffet.
The team was also surprised to find a so-called dead galaxy that had essentially lived fast and died very young soon after the big bang that supposedly created the universe. A co-author of the study, Dr. Francesco D'Eugenio, said that it was only later in the universe that galaxies stopped forming stars.
The formation of stars stops when environmental factors starve a galaxy of the gas that it needs to fuel the birth of new stars. Some of the culprits of this are supermassive black holes or violent interactions between stars.
Understanding of the Early Universe
Current scientific models are unable to explain how the newfound galaxy formed less than a billion years after the Big Bang but also why it stopped forming stars relatively quickly. Looser noted that everything seems to happen faster and more dramatically during the early stages of the universe, according to LiveScience.
The newly-discovered galaxy known as JADES-GS-z7-01-QU was found by Looser and his colleagues using James Webb's powerful infrared vision. They had the observatory peer through the thick veil of dust that obscured the earliest objects in the universe.
On top of being the oldest "dead" galaxy observed so far, it is also many times lighter than other similarly quiescent galaxies that were previously found in the early universe. The data given by Hames Webb suggests that the galaxy intensely formed stars roughly 30 million to 90 million years before it suddenly stopped.
Another co-author of the study, Professor Roberto Maiolino, said that they were unsure if any of the considered scenarios could explain what they were able to observe with James Webb. The team used data from JADES (JWST Advanced Deep Extragalactic Survey) to determine that the galaxy experienced a short and intense period of star formation, said Phys.org.
