Historic! James Webb Space Telescope finds oldest star clusters in universe
A team of Canadian astronomers, including experts from the Dunlap Institute for Astronomy & Astrophysics in the University of Toronto's Faculty of Arts & Science, have used the James Webb Telescope to identify the most distant globular clusters ever discovered - dense groups of millions of stars that may be relics containing the first and oldest stars in the universe.
The Astrophysical Journal Letters released an early study of Webb's First Deep Field picture, which shows some of the very first galaxies in the cosmos.
"JWST was built to find the first stars and the first galaxies and to help us understand the origins of complexity in the universe, such as the chemical elements and the building blocks of life," says Lamiya Mowla, a post-doctoral researcher at the Dunlap Institute for Astronomy & Astrophysics and co-lead author of the study, which was carried out by the Canadian NIRISS Unbiased Cluster Survey (CANUCS) team.
"This discovery in Webb's First Deep Field is already providing a detailed look at the earliest phase of star formation, confirming the incredible power of JWST."
The nine billion light-year-distance "Sparkler galaxy" was focused on by the astronomers in the finely detailed Webb's First Deep Field photograph. The compact objects that encircle this galaxy and look as tiny yellow-red specks have been given the moniker "sparkles" by scientists.
The research team suggested that these sparkles may represent either young clusters of stars that are actively developing, which would have formed three billion years after the Big Bang, at the height of star creation, or older globular clusters. Globular clusters are old groups of stars from the beginning of a galaxy, and they provide information about the early stages
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