New quiescent galaxy discovered with JWST

Utilizing the James Webb House Telescope (JWST), a global crew of astronomers has found a brand new quiescent galaxy. The galaxy, designated JADES-GS+53.15508-27.80178, was discovered at a excessive redshift and has a comparatively low mass. The discovering is reported in a paper revealed February 27 on the pre-print server arXiv.

Many massive galaxies are quiescent, due to this fact displaying little indicators of ongoing star formation even at excessive redshifts and they’re identified to be bodily compact. Up to now, solely only a few spectroscopically confirmed high-redshift (as much as the redshift of 5.0) quiescent galaxies have been detected. Discovering new galaxies of this kind is of excessive significance for astronomers as these objects may advance our understanding concerning the early phases of the universe.

Now, a crew of astronomers led by Tobias J. Looser of the College of Cambridge, U.Okay., studies the detection of such a galaxy past redshift of 5.0. The invention was made utilizing JWST’s Close to Infrared Digital camera (NIRCam) as a part of the JWST Superior Deep Extragalactic Survey (JADES).

“Right here we report the invention of a quiescent galaxy at z=7.3, when the universe was solely 700 million years previous—about 5% of its present age,” the researchers wrote within the paper.

JADES-GS+53.15508-27.80178 (or JADES-GS-z7-01-QU for brief) was first recognized in 2010 as a Lyman break galaxy. New NIRCam knowledge point out that it’s a quiescent galaxy that skilled a brief and intense burst of star formation adopted by fast quenching, about 10 to twenty million years in the past.

Specifically, the research discovered that the star formation price (SFR) of JADES-GS-z7-01-QU elevated considerably about 80 million years in the past. After this closing burst, lasting about 50 million years, the galaxy quenched on a brief timescale.

The outcomes present that JADES-GS-z7-01-QU reveals a whole absence of nebular emission strains, whereas the Balmer break and Lyman-alpha drop are unambiguously detected. These findings verify that JADES-GS-z7-01-QU is a post-starburst galaxy that has lately stopped forming stars.

In terms of the morphology of JADES-GS-z7-01-QU, it seems to be a compact, disk galaxy with a half-light radius of some 650 light years. The pictures additionally present a definite faint supply to the East of JADES-GS-z7-01-QU, at a distance of roughly 2,300 gentle years from the middle of the galaxy. The character of this supply is unknown, nonetheless the astronomers assume that it could be a clump or a satellite galaxy.

Summing up the outcomes, the authors of the paper famous that their discovery proves how vital JWST is for the detection and research of high-redshift quiescent galaxies.

“We conclude by emphasizing that the invention and spectroscopic evaluation of a quiescent galaxy at redshift z=7.3 by our JADES collaboration ushers the period by which we are able to constrain theoretical suggestions fashions utilizing direct observations of the primordial universe. Nonetheless, that is simply the place to begin for the JWST mission: upcoming and future observations will begin the transition from the ‘discovery’ phase to the statistical characterization of the properties of the primary quiescent galaxies,” the researchers defined.

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