NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope Spots Rare Quintet of Galaxies From the Early Universe

Astronomers have stumbled upon a scene-stealing new babe of a star by using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) and the Hubble Space Telescope. Instead, they have seen a system — let's call it JWST's Quintet — of at least five early-universe galaxies waiting to merge, just 800 million years after the Big Bang. The mergers are particularly unusual because most of them consist of only two galaxies. The discovery allows scientists to learn more about how galaxies were formed and have evolved in the early universe, and why some stopped producing new stars much earlier than scientists had previously predicted.

A Rare Discovery in the Early Universe

As per Live Science, these are emission-line galaxies (so called because they shine in hydrogen and oxygen light), which means they are forming new stars. JWST's Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam) captured a huge gas halo encasing the cluster, combined in the centre as a whole, which suggests that the galaxies are tied together by some kind of physical interaction, the researchers said.

They are also apparently extremely close to each other — some only 43,300 light-years apart — raising the likelihood that they will eventually merge.

Star Formation, Merging Process, and Future of the Galaxies

The system is similar to Stephan's Quintet, a cluster of galaxies in the nearby universe. But JWST's Quintet is much younger, and much more fertile, giving birth to new stars at an extremely fast clip. Those plank bridges were also picked up by astronomers — telltale signs of tidal forces, spurred by merging galaxies.

In all, JWST's Quintet has a stellar mass of 10 billion solar masses. This docile system, the scientists report, may grow into a quiescent (or star-forming inactive) galaxy about a billion to 1.5 billion years after the Big Bang. This could account for how some of the earliest galaxies in the universe shut down so quickly.

Now, astronomers hope to study the system better with future observations from JWST. If they can locate additional galaxy mergers like this one, scientists said, they would be able to tell how frequently such events had taken place, how galaxies had grown and whether the current understanding of how the universe operated was sufficient to explain them.