In the James Webb Space Telescope’s (JWST) first images of the universe’s earliest galaxies, the young galaxies appear too bright, too massive and too mature to have formed so soon after the Big Bang. Using new simulations, a team of astrophysicists now has discovered that these galaxies likely are not so massive after all. Although a galaxy’s brightness is typically determined by its mass, the new findings suggest that less massive galaxies can glow just as brightly from irregular, brilliant bursts of star formation.
When scientists viewed the James Webb Space Telescope's first images of the universe's earliest galaxies, they were shocked. The young galaxies appeared too bright, too massive and too mature to have formed so soon after the Big Bang. It would be like an infant growing into an adult within just a couple years.
Not only does this finding explain why young galaxies appear deceptively massive, it also fits within the standard model of cosmology."The discovery of these galaxies was a big surprise because they were substantially brighter than anticipated," said Northwestern's, Claude-André Faucher-Giguère, the study's senior author."Typically, a galaxy is bright because it's big.
"The JWST brought us a lot of knowledge about cosmic dawn," Sun said."Prior to JWST, most of our knowledge about the early universe was speculation based on data from very few sources. With the huge increase in observing power, we can see physical details about the galaxies and use that solid observational evidence to study the physics to understand what's happening."
When Sun, Faucher-Giguère and their team ran the simulations to model early galaxies formed at cosmic dawn, they discovered that stars formed in bursts -- a concept known as"bursty star formation." In massive galaxies like the Milky Way, stars form at a steady rate, with the numbers of stars gradually increasing over time.
"Most of the light in a galaxy comes from the most massive stars," Faucher-Giguère said."Because more massive stars burn at a higher speed, they are shorter lived. They rapidly use up their fuel in nuclear reactions. So, the brightness of a galaxy is more directly related to how many stars it has formed in the last few million years than the mass of the galaxy as a whole."Guochao Sun, Claude-André Faucher-Giguère, Christopher C.
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