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Record-breaking 'dead' galaxy discovered by JWST lived fast and died young in the early universe

Record-breaking 'dead' galaxy discovered by JWST lived fast and died young in the early universe

Yahoo09-04-2025
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Using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), astronomers have found the most distant (and thus the earliest) massive "dead" galaxy to date. The discovery suggests that galaxies were "dying" much earlier in the universe than previously believed.
"Death" for a galaxy refers to the slowing down, or even halting, of intense star formation, which stops a galaxy from growing. Such dead galaxies are more formally referred to as being "quiescent," or "quenched." Early dead galaxies seen by the JWST have been referred to as "red and dead" galaxies due to their lack of massive hot young blue stars and their abundance of old small red stars. They have also been dubbed "Little Red Dots" due to their appearance in JWST images.
Light from this new record-breaking galaxy, designated RUBIES-UDS-QG-z7, has been traveling to us for 13 billion years, meaning the JWST saw it as it was just 700 million years after the Big Bang. That makes it the first so-called massive quiescent galaxy (MQG) seen in the infancy of the 13.8 billion-year-old universe.
"We discovered a galaxy which formed 15 billion times the mass of the sun in stars and then stopped forming stars before the universe was only 700 million years old," team member Andrea Weibel of the University of Geneva (UNIGE) Department of Astronomy told Space.com. "This makes RUBIES-UDS-QG-z7 the most distant massive quiescent galaxy known to date."
The discovery may challenge our models of how galaxies evolve — and eventually stop growing — due to the cessation of star birth.
"The observation implies that some galaxies have stopped forming stars when the universe was only 700 million years old," Weibel said. "So far, models and simulations contain very few such objects, more than 100 times fewer than the existence of RUBIES-UDS-QG-z7 suggests. This means that the physical processes and mechanisms that regulate star formation and its termination in galaxies in the early universe may have to be revisited."
Quiescent galaxies are common immediately around the Milky Way. That's expected because the further away we look, the further back in time we are traveling. Thus, local massive galaxies have had a lot of time to start forming stars, grow to tremendous masses, and then exhaust the gas and dust needed for stellar construction, thus becoming quenched. We should expect more distant galaxies to still be enjoying their star-birthing youth.
As the JWST has probed further and further back in time, however, it has discovered earlier and earlier MQGs. Several of these red and dead galaxies were found as early as 1.2 billion years after the Big Bang. Discovered as part of the "Red Unknowns: Bright Infrared Extragalactic Survey," or RUBIES, program, RUBIES-UDS-QG-z7 pushes the detection of MQGs back by another 500 million years.
"Massive galaxies observed early in the universe only had a very limited amount of time to form their stars. This means they must have formed rapidly and efficiently, which helps us to constrain and, in some cases, even challenge theories and models of galaxy formation and growth," Weibel said. "RUBIES-UDS-QG-z7, however, is not only massive but has already stopped forming stars 50 to 100 million years before we observe it, while normal galaxies at these epochs are still building up their stellar mass through star formation."
Weibel explained that the mass of RUBIES-UDS-QG-z7 and its reconstructed formation history suggest relatively efficient star formation for the galaxy. That does not directly challenge existing models of star formation.
"The galaxy is very compact and may be an example of an object where a lot of gas and dust — the fuel of star formation — collapses and assembles into a small volume, where stars can form rapidly and efficiently for an extended period of time, or in multiple bursts," Weibel said. "What makes RUBIES-UDS-QG-z7 stand out is that it stopped forming stars so early on."
This MQG may stand out from Little Red Dots seen by the JWST in ways other than its rapid death.
"In the JWST images, RUBIES-UDS-QG-z7 resembled objects named Little Red Dots, which have been discovered with the JWST," Weibel said. "Many of these objects turned out to have strong emission lines and/or showed signs of active galactic nuclei (AGN). Thus, at least a good fraction of the light we observe from Little Red Dots may actually originate from accreting supermassive black holes, rather than stars."However, Weibel added that RUBIES-UDS-QG-z7 shows no signs of an AGN, meaning its light comes entirely from stars, not from the violent conditions around a feeding black hole.
"This then implies its rather high mass and its quiescence, which both came as a big surprise," Weibel continued. "So far, we have only found one such object in all the JWST data that we investigated."
From this, the team calculated that galaxies like RUBIES-UDS-QG-z7 should account for around one in 1 million galaxies.
"This is, however, quite uncertain, because we don't know how lucky we got to find one in the small patch of the sky that we have scanned so far," Weibel said. "With hopefully many more years of JWST taking data, we will be able to search larger areas of the sky and get a better idea of how common galaxies like RUBIES-UGD-QG-z7 actually are."
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Performing higher resolution and deeper spectroscopy imaging of this galaxy could reveal the abundances of various elements, which would help better constrain the formation history of RUBIES-UDS-QG-z7.
"We will get more data on this galaxy in the upcoming Cycle 4 of JWST observations. Specifically, higher resolution spectroscopy," Weibel said.The JWST may need a helping hand to study RUBIES-UDS-QG-z7 from Earth's largest radio telescope project, the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), which consists of 66 antennas located in the Atacama Desert region of Northern Chile."Data from the ALMA telescope at longer wavelengths of light can give us direct insight into the gas and dust content of the galaxy, which is closely related to its past and future star formation history," Weibel said.
The team's research was published on April 1 in The Astrophysical Journal.
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JWST Spots Ancient Light That Shouldn't Exist
JWST Spots Ancient Light That Shouldn't Exist

Scientific American

time7 hours ago

  • Scientific American

JWST Spots Ancient Light That Shouldn't Exist

Since its launch in late 2021, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has been glimpsing some of the earliest epochs of cosmic time. Its observations have stretched cosmologists' timelines of when galaxies may have first started to form. And now some of the telescope's farthest observations yet have revealed sources of blue ultraviolet light from an epoch when stars shouldn't have existed yet. The observations indicate nine new light sources, with six at redshift 17 and three at redshift 25, when the universe was only 200 million to 100 million years old. 'It's the deepest by a factor of a few compared to any other data obtained by JWST in the whole mission,' says Pablo Pérez-González, an astrophysicist at the Center for Astrobiology in Madrid. He is lead author of a preprint paper reporting the findings that has been accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal. 'If we believe that they are truly at those redshifts, the universe was much, much more active its first 200 million years' than astronomers had thought, Pérez-González says. On supporting science journalism If you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today. If accurate, the newly sighted objects don't merely expand the timeline of galaxy formation back to a much earlier period; they sit in direct conflict with astronomers' best cosmological models of when stars began to form during the cosmic dawn. For this reason, another group of astronomers have put forward a hypothesis to make sense of these puzzling findings. They have proposed that 'primordial' black holes created right after the big bang may have lit up the universe before the first stars. Their preprint paper has been accepted for publication in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics. "If stars cannot explain the source of the luminosity and the numbers that we see, something else should be producing the light,' says Andrea Ferrara, an astrophysicist at the Superior Normal School (SNS) in Pisa, Italy, and co-author of the first paper. 'This can only be a primordial black hole.' In other words, it's possible that the first objects to bathe the early universe in light were not stars but rather hungry black holes that burst into existence mere seconds after the big bang itself. The Trouble with Early Galaxies The farther we peer out to our cosmic horizons, the further back in time we see. And because the universe itself is expanding, light traveling from extremely distant sources has stretched its wavelength all the way to the infrared part of the electromagnetic spectrum. This phenomenon is what astrophysicists refer to as redshift. 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'JWST is finding too many too massive galaxies too early in the universe,' says astrophysicist Allison Kirkpatrick of the University of Kansas, who specializes in galaxy evolution and was not involved in the new studies. To date, the oldest confirmed galaxies observed by JWST are at redshift 14, when the universe was only 300 million years old. 'So the idea here was to go beyond that, to redshift 15 and beyond,' Pérez-González says. His team's report of nine new objects at even higher redshifts will need confirmation. To determine whether the objects are as far as they seem to be, astronomers must break up their light into specific wavelengths in a process called spectroscopy. Drawing on data collected by JWST's Near Infrared Camera (NIRCam) over two imaging surveys, Pérez-González and his team identified the new candidate galaxies from a pool of more than 80,000. After imaging a region of the sky with different filters for more than 100 hours, the astronomers were able to identify galaxies at different brightnesses and select the most promising candidates for further observation. Casting a wide net means their sample is less likely to be biased before they zoom in on the most interesting distant objects. The suspected galaxies Pérez-González and his team found shine with bright blue light in the ultraviolet range of the spectrum—exactly the light astronomers believe the massive first stars would have produced. The problem with this scenario, however, is that galaxy evolution models have an extremely tough time producing stars at such early stages of the universe's development. It's doubtful that this time frame would have allowed enough time for gas to cool and gather into clouds large enough to gravitationally collapse into the first generation of stars. 'Galaxies cannot form quickly because the gas in the early universe is very hot, preventing it from collapsing into galaxies and stars,' Kirkpatrick says. 'Instead dark matter structure grows first, and the immense gravity funnels gas to the center to grow the first stars and galaxies. This all takes time, more time than 100 million years.' Black Holes from the Very Beginning To get around this problem, Ferrara and his collaborators propose that primordial black holes—a distinct population of black holes that may have emerged in the first few seconds after the big bang—were consuming gas in the early universe. This feeding frenzy could have released light that we are now detecting with JWST at periods before the first stars formed. Bizarrely, black holes, not stars, might have been the first significant sources of light in the early universe. Typically, black holes form when massive stars collapse after they run out of fuel or when a large cloud of gas directly collapses in on itself, bypassing the stellar phase. Primordial black holes, however, are different. 'What we are proposing is that primordial black holes formed less than one second to five seconds after the big bang,' Ferrara says. 'These have been essentially there forever, from the beginning.' Initially, these black holes would have started out small, 'no larger than the size of an atom,' Kirkpatrick says. Scientists think that within the first second of the universe as we know it bursting into existence, a rapid period of expansion, known as inflation, caused space to increase in size by 35 orders of magnitude, equivalent to an atom stretching to the size of the solar system. 'This has a lot of consequences, including the creation of very small black holes,' Kirkpatrick says. 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"So we measured the sizes, and some of the candidates are, to the best of our knowledge with the data that we have, pointlike but not all of them. Some of them are extended. So maybe 30 percent of them are consistent with what a primordial black hole might look like," Pérez-González says. Right now the data are hardly definitive. Because primordial black holes have hypothetically been around since the very beginning of the universe, they should also leave traces in the cosmic microwave background (CMB), a snapshot of the universe as it existed 380,000 years after the big bang. 'Our pictures of the CMB maps are still a little bit too blurred in order to see the fine-structure details that primordial black holes may have introduced,' Ferrara says. For now, a definitive answer is just beyond reach. The possible presence of primordial black holes may, however, make sense of another cosmological conundrum: the existence of supermassive black holes at the centers of galaxies at early epochs. 'We haven't yet proved how the first supermassive black hole seeds form, and this could be one pathway. It would help resolve some of the tension with JWST observations and cosmological models,' Kirkpatrick says. 'These observations are difficult, and we are pushing the JWST to its limit,' Ferrara says. 'We have to be careful because maybe these galaxies could turn out to be contaminants or lower-redshift galaxies or something else.' But whether these mysterious black beacons outshone the first stars is a question we may soon have an answer to.

How far can the most powerful telescope see into space?
How far can the most powerful telescope see into space?

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timea day ago

  • Yahoo

How far can the most powerful telescope see into space?

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August Moon: Here's what to look for during all 4 major moon phases
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August Moon: Here's what to look for during all 4 major moon phases

When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. The ever-shifting phases of Earth's moon present a wealth of targets for amateur astronomers to explore, ranging from magnificent craters and lunar seas to strange visual phenomena created as sunlight plays across the ancient surface, forming familiar shapes where none should be. So, grab your telescope and join us on a short, guided "road trip" of August's moon, in which we'll highlight a series of stunning targets to explore during each moon phase. Any backyard telescope will allow you to pick out the targets on our list, though a scope with an aperture of 6 inches or more will help reveal more detail across ancient lunar landscapes. Be sure to check out our roundups of the best telescopes and binoculars for exploring the solar system if you find yourself wanting a closer look at Earth's natural satellite. 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A 6-inch telescope will help you zero in on the landing zone — known as Tranquility Base — by looking to the lower right of the prominent Ritter and Sabine craters, which can be found on the western edge of the lunar mare. Two nights later, on Aug. 4, the moon's terminator will fall slightly to the west of the Sinus Iridum impact basin, causing a brilliant "Golden Handle' to appear in the northwest region of the lunar surface. This striking effect occurs when the sun's rays pick out the peaks of the Montes Jura mountain range on the northern edge of Mare Imbrium. The full "Sturgeon Moon" (Aug. 9) By Aug. 9, the relentless westward march of the terminator will have swept across the entirety of the lunar surface, setting the stage for the full "Sturgeon Moon" to slip above the horizon at sunset, local time. The Sturgeon Moon is named for the time of year when the titular fish are most readily caught; it presents a good opportunity to observe the mighty form of Tycho crater extending its influence over the lunar disk. Tycho is easily visible to the naked eye, thanks in part to the vast streaks (or rays) of reflective material cast outward across the lunar surface in the wake of the brutal asteroid impact that created the 53-mile-wide (85-kilometer) crater. Every one of the moon's larger impact sites would have once played host to a bright ray system like Tycho, though exposure to the harsh space environment has since caused many to fade. After all, Tycho formed a mere 108 million years ago, while other lunar craters have been estimated to be 3.9 billion years of age. The August full moon also presents a great time to learn the locations of the many lunar mare (Latin for "seas") that can be spotted with the naked eye as the surface of Earth's natural satellite darkens. 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The third quarter moon (Aug. 16) The passing of the full moon will see the terminator return to sweep over the eastern limb of the lunar surface until, finally, on Aug. 16, the third quarter moon will rise, with its right half bathed in shadow and its left illuminated by direct sunlight. Aug. 16 is a great opportunity to observe a dramatic display of light and shadow play across the terminator and to hunt down a pair of massive craters named to honor two legendary ancient Greek philosophers, inventors and astronomers: Plato and Archimedes. Look for the 62-mile-wide (10 km) Plato Crater just below the narrow form of Mare Frigoris soon after the moon rises around midnight on Aug. 16. Then, follow the terminator south to find the similarly sized Archimedes impact site above the pronounced sweep of the Montes Apenninus mountain range. The following night (Aug. 17) is a wonderful time to see the Copernicus and Kepler craters brightening Oceanus Procellarum. Both impact sites are surrounded by bright ejecta rays, albeit less pronounced than those exhibited by Tycho further to the south. The Copernicus Crater looks particularly impressive around this time, with its westward rim and central peak cast into relief by the oblique angle of the sun. Copernicus had been proposed as a candidate landing site for the Apollo 18 crewed lunar mission, though the program was cancelled long before its scheduled launch date due to budget constraints. New moon (August 23) During the new moon phase, the lunar disk lurks unseen in the daytime sky, leaving the night unblemished by the glare of reflected sunlight. Head away from city lights around this time to hunt the glowing band of the Milky Way's core, which can be spotted during the summer months streaming towards the eastern horizon as dusk gives way to night in dark sky locations. 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