The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has discovered a tiny galaxy in the early universe that is growing rapidly as it forms stars at a tremendous rate, revealing more about the progenitors of galaxies such as our own.
The galaxy, referred to as RX J2129-z95, is seen at a redshift of 9.51. That number, which refers to the extent to which the galaxy’s light has been stretched by the expansion of the universe, means that we are seeing it as it existed just 510 million years after the Big Bang.
Because it is so distant, RX J2129-z95 is exceptionally faint. However, its light received a boost from the gravitational-lensing effect of a massive foreground galaxy cluster called RX J2129.6+0005, which is located about 2.5 billion light-years from Earth along the same line of sight. The gravity of the 150-trillion-solar-mass cluster amplified the light of RX J2129-z95, as well as splitting it into three images.
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The galaxy’s redshift was confirmed by JWST‘s NIRSpec (Near-Infrared Spectrometer) instrument, which also detected strong emission from hydrogen and oxygen gas clouds within RX J2129-z95. These emission lines in the galaxy’s spectrum have revealed some of RX J2129-z95’s extraordinary properties.
For example, RX J2129-z95 is just 105.6 light-years across, which is tiny compared to the 100,000 light-year-diameter of our Milky Way galaxy or even modern dwarf galaxies that span several thousand light years. Yet despite having a volume a thousand times less than the Milky Way, RX J2129-z95’s rate of star formation is the same as our galaxy’s, meaning it is much more intense.
JWST is finding that such high star-formation rates are a fairly typical trait of galaxies in the early universe, but RX J2129-z95 is extreme even as far as high-redshift galaxies go.
“The star-formation rate is similar to other high-redshift galaxies confirmed with NIRSPec, but the radius of the galaxy is at least three times smaller than those other galaxies,” said Hayley Williams, a PhD student at the University of Minnesota who led the research, in an interview with Space.com. “This means that a ton of star formation is packed into a very tiny…
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