NASA's James Webb Space Telescope Stuns Researchers as It Captures a Treasure of Hidden Stars in Distant Galaxies
NASA's James Webb Space Telescope has added another honor to its name by locating a record number of new stars in a faraway galaxy. Researchers claimed that the famous telescope captured 44 individual stars present in a galaxy 6.5 billion light-years away from the Milky Way Galaxy, stated ABC News. Experts believe, that to get the pictures, the telescope used high-resolution optics and distortion in space. Findings regarding the identification of this 'treasure trove' of stars were published in the journal Nature Astronomy.
Many of the stars' images James Webb Space Telescope captured in the far away galaxy were unknown to astronomers. Center for Astrophysics explained that the feature of the telescope along with the gravitational lensing that happened on those stars aided in getting the pictures. Gravitational lensing occurs when a massive amount of matter facilitates a gravitational field which magnifies light coming from distant galaxies located right behind it. The resultant effect is that any astronomical object in the line of sight during this phenomenon gets magnified for the viewer.
In this case, the stars were magnified due to the gravitational field produced by Abell 370, a cluster of galaxies. The magnification allowed researchers to spot several background sources of light and examine their internal structures. In the process, they were able to find stars located 6.5 billion light-years away. Experts noted an arc was made in space through the gravitational lensing and bending of light done by Abell 370, and named it the "Dragon Arc." The color of each star in this arc was noted, and experts stated that some of them were red supergiants, this implies they were in the last stages of their lives.
This finding was distinct from what was previously asserted by researchers regarding the stars in that particular portion of space. Astronomers in the past had identified only blue supergiants 6.5 billion light-years away from the Milky Way Galaxy. Researchers are delighted by this achievement of the James Webb Space Telescope because it has been typically difficult for experts to capture images from far away galaxies. "To us, galaxies that are very far away usually look like a diffuse, fuzzy blob," lead author, Yoshinobu Fudamoto, an assistant professor at Chiba University in Japan added.
The possibility of getting such clear images was so unfeasible for researchers that they weren't even in the pursuit of it. Center for Astrophysics likened trying to capture such faraway stars to "raising a pair of binoculars at the moon in hopes of making out individual grains of dust inside its craters." The discovery happened accidentally while trying to locate the background light sources in the galaxies. The finding opened new avenues for experts. "This groundbreaking discovery demonstrates, for the first time, that studying large numbers of individual stars in a distant galaxy is possible," Fengwu Sun, a postdoctoral researcher at the Center for Astrophysics and co-author of the study said. "We now have the capability to resolve stars that were previously outside of our capability."
Researchers are hopeful that the images will help astronomers learn more about the elusive dark matter of space, according to Space. The discovery further proves how much of a leap forward the James Webb telescope could provide in the exploration of space. "I never dreamed of Webb seeing them in such large numbers," Rogier Windhorst, an astronomer at the Arizona State University, who was part of the discovery team stated. "And now here we are observing these stars popping in and out of the images taken only a year apart, like fireflies in the night. Webb continues to amaze us all."