13-Billion-Year-Old Dead Galaxy Ghost Recently Captured by James Webb Space Telescope
NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) recently discovered an old galaxy that died young. The most powerful telescope of our time made the fascinating discovery while conducting the deepest observations to spot the oldest dead galaxy in space.
The galaxy existed when the universe was just 700 million years old, approximately over 13 billion years ago. But does astronomers name it a dead galaxy? Astronomers at the University of Cambridge generally referred to the cosmic object as a dead galaxy as it has stopped producing stars in the blink of cosmic time.
Why This Dead Galaxy Is Difficult To Find
Finding this type of galaxy during the early universe is one of the complex challenges astronomers encounter while analyzing data from JWST. The early universe was quite mysterious and dramatic. Hence, researchers still struggle to understand how its environment was shaped fully.
Researchers made this new discovery by using the James Webb Space Telescope to observe the depths of the cosmos. They captured the galaxy that stopped star formation over 13 billion years ago. The strange galaxy lived fast as it went from being an active star-forming galaxy to a dead state within a shorter period on a cosmic scale.
Based on recent data from Webb, astronomers discovered that this new galaxy lived for a short period as it experienced a short and quick burst of star formation between 30 and 90 million years old. But between 10 and 20 million years before Webb observed it, the galaxy has stopped star formation.
Tobias Looser, the paper’s first author from the Kavli Institute for Cosmology, suggested that the Universe entered its extremely active phase during its first few hundred million years.
During that time, many gas clouds began to collapse to create new stars. Looser also said that galaxies mostly need a rich supply of gas to create new stars. The infant Universe provided these galaxies with enough gas to form new stars.
Generally, galaxies usually reduce their star formation activities after billions of years following a gradual process. However, this dead galaxy stopped forming stars so early, making it one of the rarest galaxies to ever exist.
What Could Have Caused The Existence of This Galaxy?
Scientists behind the study suggest several possible explanations as regards why this dead galaxy stopped forming new stars that early. One of the possible explanations is that the supermassive black hole at the center of the galaxy possesses powerful jets that have the potential to sweep vital stellar gas out of the galaxy, thereby stopping the birth of new stars. Another explanation is that the stars may swiftly eat up the galaxy’s gas making the dead galaxy cannot replenish its gas fast enough, which leads to gas depletion.
Roberto Maiolino, the study co-author said that they are not certain if any of the above scenarios best explain what they have observed with the James Webb Space Telescope.
Maiolino also said that they have previously relied on models based on the modern universe to understand what actually happened during the early Universe. However, modern technologies like the JWST have enabled them to look further back in time to see how stars were forming rapidly during the early Universe.
The latest discovery suggests that the findings could be necessary for understanding the early galaxies’ evolution and star formation activity in the young universe. The results were published in the journal Nature.