SciTechDaily
Researchers from the University of Colorado at Boulder with the help of of the James Webb telescope discovered large, dust-soaked, ultraviolet galaxies.
According to the lead author of the study, Justus Gibson, a doctoral student at the Department of Astrophysical and Planetary Sciences, the research was devoted to these to mysterious galaxies, which astronomers have already called UFOs. The researchers note that these galaxies are significantly different from all those known before. They are close to the limit of observation of telescopes such as Hubble, which has not been able to detect them because these galaxies emit very little visible light.
Using the image, received from James Webb, and computer modeling, astronomers have determined that these ultraviolet galaxies resemble our Milky Way in shape and size, but they are literally soaked in dust.
«JWST allows us to see this type of galaxy that we would never have been able to see before It tells us that maybe we didn’t understand the universe as well as we thought we did», — Justus Gibson notes.
According to Erica Nelson, an associate professor of astrophysics at the University of Colorado, these galaxies are visually striking. They look like huge red disks. This came as a surprise to scientists.
Justus Gibson explains that these galaxies appear red because they emit very little visible light. Most of the radiation detected from these galaxies comes in the infrared range. The small amount of visible light from them that the human eye can detect comes in the red spectrum.
Such galaxies are almost invisible to telescopes such as Hubble, which traditionally work with visible light sources. However James Webb on the contrary, collects ultraviolet radiation and sees these mysterious space structures clearly.
«Before the launch «James Webb» we thought we would find very distant galaxies But we thought that closer to us, we already had a pretty good understanding of all types of galaxies», — Justus Gibson said.
In the new study, Gibson and his colleagues relied on observations from a collaborative effort called the JWST Advanced Deep Extragalactic Survey (JADES). In total, the astronomers managed to detect 56 UFO galaxies in the images. All the galaxies were literally saturated with dust.
Astronomers say that all galaxies, and even the Solar System, contain interplanetary dust, consisting of the remnants of dying stars that exploded a long time ago, throwing tiny particles of metals into space. However, mysterious ultraviolet galaxies contain much more dust than the Milky Way. They have enough dust to block about 50 times as much light as is emitted into outer space.
As emphasized by Gibson, these galaxies are shaped like traditional disks, and some of them — look like soccer balls and even spheres. Currently, scientists do not have an answer to the question of why these galaxies contain so much dust.
The study was published in the journal The Astrophysical Journal
Source: SciTechDaily