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In Odd Galaxy, NASA's Webb Finds Potential Missing Link to First Stars

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September 25, 2024 10:00AM (EDT)Release ID: 2024-133
A black background sprinkled with small, colorful galaxies in orange, blue, and white. On the left, a third of the way down from the top of the image, a very faint dot of a galaxy is outlined with a white square and pulled out in a graphic to be shown magnified. In the pullout square to the right, the galaxy is a hazy white dot edged in orange, with faint blue projections opposite each other at the 11 o’clock and 5 o’clock positions.

Summary

With its gas shining brighter than its stars, a strange galaxy found one billion years after the big bang may represent a previously-unknown phase of galactic evolution.

Amid a crowded field of galaxies captured by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, one otherwise inconspicuous galaxy stands out for emitting a light signature that astronomers have never seen before. Together, an observational astronomer and a theorist investigated potential causes. They concluded that the strange spectrum of galaxy GS-NDG-9422 is likely coming from its super-heated gas, not its stars. This intriguing conclusion opens up several future paths for investigation, including the connection between this odd galaxy and the universe’s first generation of stars – also predicted to be outshone by nebular gas.

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Full Article

Looking deep into the early universe with NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, astronomers have found something unprecedented: a galaxy with an odd light signature, which they attribute to its gas outshining its stars. Found approximately one billion years after the big bang, galaxy GS-NDG-9422 (9422) may be a missing-link phase of galactic evolution between the universe’s first stars and familiar, well-established galaxies. “My first thought in looking at the galaxy’s spectrum was, ‘that’s weird,’ which is exactly what the Webb telescope was designed ...

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News releases highlighting the discoveries of NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope are produced for NASA by the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore, Maryland, under NASA Contract NAS5-03127. News release content is developed by the News Team in STScI’s Office of Public Outreach.

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