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<\/a><\/p>\nThis Webb image shows the jellyfish galaxy COSMOS2020-635829; the dashed circles mark the four extraplanar sources that are identified in the tail of the galaxy. Image credit: Roberts et al., doi: 10.3847\/1538-4357\/ae3824.<\/p>\n
\u201cJellyfish galaxies are named for the long, tentacle-like streams that trail behind them,\u201d said Dr. Ian Roberts from the University of Waterloo and colleagues.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey move quickly through their hot, dense galaxy cluster, and the gas within the cluster acts like a strong wind pushing the jellyfish galaxy\u2019s own gas out the back, forming trails.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThe technical term for this process is ram-pressure stripping.\u201d<\/p>\n
The authors found the new jellyfish galaxy in deep space data captured by Webb.<\/p>\n
Named COSMOS2020-635829, it lies in the COSMOS field, a particular patch of the sky that many telescopes have observed to study distant galaxies.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe were looking through a large amount of data from this well-studied region in the sky with the hopes of spotting jellyfish galaxies that haven\u2019t been studied before,\u201d Dr. Roberts said.<\/p>\n
\u201cEarly on in our search of the Webb data, we spotted a distant, undocumented jellyfish galaxy that sparked immediate interest.\u201d<\/p>\n
COSMOS2020-635829 had a normal-looking galaxy disk and bright blue knots in its trails, which are very young stars.<\/p>\n
The age of the stars suggests that they were formed outside of the main galaxy in the trails of stripped gas, which is expected in a galaxy of this nature.<\/p>\n
Information gathered from studying this galaxy has challenged some previously held beliefs about what was happening in deep space at that time.<\/p>\n
Scientists believed that galaxy clusters were still forming and that ram-pressure stripping was uncommon.<\/p>\n
Dr. Roberts and co-authors made three additional discoveries that could change how we understand the Universe.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe first is that cluster environments were already harsh enough to strip galaxies, and the second is that galaxy clusters may strongly alter galaxy properties earlier than expected,\u201d Dr. Roberts said.<\/p>\n
\u201cAnother is that all the challenges listed might have played a part in building the large population of dead galaxies we see in galaxy clusters today.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThese data provide us with rare insight into how galaxies were transformed in the early Universe.\u201d<\/p>\n