Astronomers studying the early universe with NASA\u2019s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) have found what seems to be a time traveler from the future: a large galaxy so chock-full of dust that the light from its bountiful blue stars has turned a crimson hue. Such heavy loads of dust are generally thought to arise much later in cosmic history than circa 400 million years after the big bang, the epoch at which this newfound galaxy appears.<\/p>\n
Although the work has yet to be peer-reviewed, a preprint study<\/a> that analyzed this \u201cred monster\u201d galaxy, officially called EGS-z11-R0, is already making waves in the astronomical community. \u201cIt\u2019s astonishing to think about how short these timescales are,\u201d says Pieter van Dokkum, an astrophysicist at Yale University, who was not involved in the study. \u201cSharks and turtles have been around for about that long.\u201d<\/p>\n For perspective, seeing such a big, dusty galaxy less than a half-billion years into the universe\u2019s 13.8-billion-year history is a bit like finding a redwood tree towering over saplings in a recently plowed field; it\u2019s hard to explain how something so giant reached maturity so quickly, in a cosmic blink of an eye. Clues could come from studying other behemoths lurking in the galactic vicinity\u2014\u201cblue monster\u201d galaxies, also uncovered by JWST but lacking the red-inducing buildup of dust. (Red monsters shouldn\u2019t be conflated with JWST\u2019s \u201clittle red dots<\/a>,\u201d an entirely different but no less mysterious type of object that the observatory has spied in the early universe and that are now thought to indicate still-forming supermassive black holes<\/a>.)<\/p>\n Sign up for Today in Science, a free daily newsletter from Scientific American and join a community of science-loving readers.<\/a><\/p>\n Giulia Rodighiero, the study\u2019s lead author and an astronomer at the University of Padua in Italy, had wondered whether other large objects, perhaps obscured by their own dust, might be dwelling among JWST\u2019s blue monsters. So she and her colleagues scoured through the Dawn JWST Archive\u2014a repository of public JWST galaxy data\u2014for possible contenders. EGS-z11-R0 was the sole clear candidate that emerged.<\/p>\n The telltale signature of abundant dust lies within the galaxy\u2019s continuum of ultraviolet light, which has a relatively flat slope as a result of absorption from the dust. Rodighiero notes that while the researchers\u2019 analysis indicates that the reddening effect comes primarily from dust, they\u2019re still after more direct evidence because light emanating from clumps of ionized gas within the galaxy may also be involved. By obtaining a spectrum from EGS-z11-R0\u2014that is, by gathering and parsing its light into constituent colors, or wavelengths\u2014the team also found evidence of carbon as another sign of galactic maturity. \u201cThere\u2019s a whole cycle that has to happen before you get to a very dust-obscured, red galaxy like this,\u201d van Dokkum says. \u201cIt\u2019s surprising this happened so fast and so early.\u201d The study is a \u201ctour de force\u201d in extracting such indicative signatures, he adds.<\/p>\n The new red monster is just one of a growing group, with others usually spotted at times closer to about a billion years after the big bang. Such galaxies had already surprised astronomers because of their surprising maturity. But with its placement at just 400 million years into the universe\u2019s history, the new monster is a sort of anomaly among anomalies. Still, JWST\u2019s keen gaze can peer back even further into the past<\/a>. So far, the telescope has managed to spot galaxies as early as about 280 million years after the big bang. The new finding, however, seems to push the universe\u2019s earliest epochs of galaxy formation even further back than astronomers had once thought. Given the time it takes for stars to churn out such atoms and dust, van Dokkum says, EGS-z11-R0\u2019s existence suggests astronomers could spot galaxies as early as 200 million years after the big bang.<\/p>\n As the new class of ancient red monsters emerges, so do some key questions: How does the dust build up so fast, and why do only some galaxies have it? Finding answers will likely entail assembling a larger sample of these early-onset red monsters, as well as observing them through different instruments onboard JWST, which can detect shorter and longer infrared wavelengths, says Callum Donnan, an expert on galactic evolution at the National Science Foundation\u2019s National Optical-Infrared Astronomy Research Laboratory, who did not partake in the study.<\/p>\n Rodighiero and her team already have their suspicions about how the red and blue monsters can coexist in the early universe\u2014perhaps the blue galaxies are in fact born from the red ones as the dust disperses. \u201cWe think that they are connected by the same evolutionary story,\u201d she says. \u201cIt\u2019s just that we catch galaxies in different periods, and it\u2019s much easier to detect a blue monster.\u201d She and her team hope that discovering more objects might help astronomers understand these galactic phases, and they also plan to look at a larger range of infrared light to fully confirm that EGS-z11-R0\u2019s redness comes from its dust.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Astronomers studying the early universe with NASA\u2019s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) have found what seems to be…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":616744,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[10240,24391,35132,267630,79],"class_list":["post-616743","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-science","tag-galaxies","tag-james-webb-space-telescope","tag-monster","tag-pieter-van-dokkum","tag-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/616743","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=616743"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/616743\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/616744"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=616743"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=616743"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=616743"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}