A study detailing the findings were published Thursday in The Astrophysical Journal Letters. These clusters are dense groups that contain millions of stars, some of which may be the first and oldest stars in the universe. Now, researchers have conducted an analysis of Webb’s first deep field and spotted the most distant globular clusters ever seen. The galaxy cluster is shown as it appeared 4.6 billion years ago. Some of these distant galaxies and star clusters have never been seen before. The Toronto Sparkler research is published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.The image of SMACS 0723 is "the deepest and sharpest infrared image of the distant universe to date," according to NASA. Did we just find a special galaxy or is this something we can expect to see more of when we have a representative sample from Webb," he told BBC News. "We want to know how ubiquitous these sparkles are. "That's really going to push up the number of galaxies that we find with sparkles around them," said Dunlap Institute postdoctoral fellow Dr Kartheik Iyer. ![]() The Toronto research programme, called the CAnadian NIRISS Unbiased Cluster Survey (CANUCS), will now examine five more gravitationally lensed views from James Webb similar to its SMACS image. ![]() And then we literally got sidetracked by the most shiny, sparkly object." "Everyone is looking for those stars and when we first opened the SMACS image, we too were searching for the furthest stuff, the farthest things. "They're the Holy Grail, right?" said Dr Mowla. It's even possible, the astronomers say, that the sparkles contain some of the very first stars ever to form in the Universe. The team contends the stars in these globular sparkles probably formed just a few hundred million years after the Big Bang. For something to be relatively young, it has to be bluer, and what we're finding is that they're much redder than we expected them to be, which means they must be older, even at that very early time," she told BBC News. "They could have formed in a burst at what we call 'cosmic noon', at the peak of star formation at about 10 billion years ago. ![]() "We are finding these globular clusters to be very massive," explained Dr Lamiya Mowla from Toronto's Dunlap Institute for Astronomy & Astrophysics. We see the Sparkler as it was nine billion years in the past, or about 4.5 billion years after the Big Bang. The team's contention is that the sparkles are globular clusters just like the globulars seen around our Milky Way today, except we're seeing these dots much, much earlier in the history of the Universe. Multiple projections: The Sparkler appears in three different places in the SMACS 0723 image Was it possible they were just sitting out there on their own instead, a long way in front or behind the Sparkler? But it soon became obvious that they were associated because the Sparkler Galaxy itself is projected three times in the SMACS 0723 image. The Toronto team wondered at first whether the sparkles were even associated with the Sparkler Galaxy. You couldn't see them with that other great observatory, Hubble, for instance. Only with James Webb's extraordinary power are these dots resolvable. They've dubbed it "the Sparkler Galaxy" because it's surrounded by small yellow-red dots - by "sparkles". It shows a set of massive foreground galaxies that have magnified and bent the light coming from galaxies in the background.Īnd it's one particularly pretty galaxy in the far distance that's caught the eye of astronomers at the University of Toronto. The picture, called SMACS 0723, is an example of what's referred to as a gravitational lens. Nasa space telescope delivers spectacular picturesĪ $10bn machine in search of the end of darkness Ringed Neptune captured by James Webb telescope
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