Astronomers using the James Webb Space Telescope have made a surprising discovery about a galaxy long, long ago and far, far away: It isn\u2019t rotating.\u00a0<\/p>\n
That\u2019s something only seen in the most massive, mature galaxies that are closer to us in space and time, said Ben Forrest<\/a>, a research scientist in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of California, Davis, and first author on the paper published May 4 in Nature Astronomy<\/a>.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cThis one in particular did not show any evidence of rotation, which was surprising and very interesting,\u201d Forrest said.<\/p>\n According to current theories, as the first galaxies formed, angular momentum from inflowing gas and the influence of gravity set them spinning.\u00a0<\/p>\n Over many billions of years, some galaxies, especially those within galaxy clusters, merged with each other multiple times and their combined rotations added to or partly canceled each other. That\u2019s why some galaxies that are closest to Earth (and therefore also relatively recent) can show little overall rotation but a lot of random movement of stars within them.\u00a0<\/p>\n This process should take an enormously long time, so it\u2019s surprising that galaxy XMM-VID1-2075 had achieved this state when the universe was less than 2 billion years old.\u00a0<\/p>\n Forrest and colleagues in the MAGAZ3NE (Massive Ancient Galaxies at z>3 NEar-Infrared) survey\u00a0had previously observed this galaxy with the W.M. Keck observatory in Hawai\u02bbi.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cPrevious MAGAZ3NE observations had confirmed this was one of the most massive galaxies in the early universe, with already several times as many stars as our Milky Way, and also confirmed that it was no longer forming new stars, making it a compelling target for follow-up observations,\u201d Forrest said.<\/p>\n Pushing the frontiers<\/p>\n The team used the James Webb Space Telescope to take a closer look at XMM-VID1-2075 and two other galaxies of similar age. They were able to measure the relative movement of material inside them.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cThis type of work has been done a lot with nearby galaxies because they’re closer and larger and so you can do these kinds of studies from the ground, but it’s very difficult to do with high redshift galaxies because they appear a lot smaller in the sky,\u201d Forrest said. \u201c(James Webb Space Telescope) is really pushing the frontier for these kinds of studies.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Of the three galaxies they sampled, one is clearly rotating, one is \u201ckind of messy,\u201d and one has no rotation but a lot of random motion, Forrest said. \u201cThat\u2019s consistent with some of the most massive galaxies in the local universe, but it was a bit surprising to find it so early on.\u201d<\/p>\n The lack of color contrast in the image of XMM-VID1-2075 (left panel) shows a lack of rotational movement compared to the other two galaxies (center and right).\u00a0<\/p>\n How did this galaxy become a \u201cslow rotator\u201d in less than 2 billion years? One possibility is that it is the result not of multiple mergers, but a single collision between two galaxies rotating pretty much in opposite directions. That idea is supported by the team\u2019s observations.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cFor this particular galaxy, we see a large excess of light off to the side. And so that’s suggestive of some other object which has come in and is interacting with the system and potentially changing its dynamics,\u201d Forrest said.<\/p>\n The astronomers are continuing to look for other, similar objects in the early universe. By comparing their observations with simulations, they can test theories about galaxy formation.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cThere are some simulations that predict that there will be a very small number of these non-rotating galaxies very early in the universe, but they expect them to be quite rare. And so this is one way in which we can test these simulations and really figure out how common they are, and that can then give us information about whether our theories of this evolution are correct,\u201d Forrest said.<\/p>\n Additional co-authors on the paper are: Brian C. Lemaux, UC Davis and Gemini Observatory, Hawai\u02bbi;\u00a0 Adam Muzzin and Adit H. Edward, York University, Toronto; Danilo Marchesini, Richard Pan and Nehir Ozden, Tufts University; Jacqueline Antwi-Danso, University of Toronto; Wenjun Chang, UC Riverside; M. C. Cooper and Stephanie M. Urbano Stawinski, UC Irvine; Percy Gomez, W. M. Keck Observatory, Kamuela, Hawai\u02bbi; Lucas Kimmig and Rhea-Silvia Remus, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universit\u00e4t M\u00fcnchen, Germany;\u00a0 Ian McConachie, University of Wisconsin-Madison; Allison Noble, Arizona State University; and Gillian Wilson and M. E. Wisz, UC Merced.\u00a0<\/p>\n The work was supported by grants from NASA, the Space Telescope Science Institute and National Science Foundation.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Astronomers using the James Webb Space Telescope have made a surprising discovery about a galaxy long, long ago…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":649025,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[800,49,48,241238,241237,12584,10758,4983,66],"class_list":["post-649024","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-science","tag-astronomy","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-college-of-letters-and-science","tag-department-of-physics-and-astronomy","tag-galaxies","tag-headline","tag-james-webb-space-telescope","tag-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/649024","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=649024"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/649024\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/649025"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=649024"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=649024"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=649024"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}