Published 10 February 2023 at 08.58
Domestic. Thanks to the James Webb Telescope's first images of galaxy clusters, a group of researchers from Stockholm University has for the first time been able to examine very compact structures of star clusters inside galaxies, so-called clumps, and study the first phase of star formation in distant galaxies.
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– The galaxy clusters we examined are so massive that they bend the light passing through their center, just as Einstein predicted in 1915. And this in turn creates a kind of magnifying glass effect: the galaxies in the background are magnified in the image, says Adélaïde Claeyssens at the Department of Astronomy, Stockholm University.
The magnifying glass effect and the resolution of the James Webb Telescope have made it possible to study the connection between how clumps, very compact structures of star clusters, form and evolve and how galaxies form and grow some million years after the Big Bang. And in a way that hasn't been done before.
– The images from the James Webb Telescope show that we can find these very small clumpy structures inside very distant galaxies and that we can see the clumps in many of the galaxies. It changes the entire field of research and helps us understand how galaxies form and evolve, says Angela Adamo, Oscar Klein Center, Stockholm University.
The oldest galaxy in the survey is so far away that the researchers can see what it looked like 13 billion years ago, when the universe was “only” 680 million years old.