Our astronomers have looked back more than ten billion years in time to find that the Universe’s early galaxies developed much faster than scientists previously thought.
Researchers in our Centre for Extragalactic Astronomy led an international team who found evidence of bar formation in galaxies when the Universe was only a few billion years old.
Bars are elongated strips of stars found in disc or spiral galaxies like our Milky Way.
As bars develop, they regulate star formation within a galaxy, pushing gas into the galaxy’s central region. Their presence tells scientists that galaxies have entered a settled, mature phase.
The research team used the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) to make their discovery.
Previous studies carried out using the less powerful Hubble Space Telescope had previously been able to detect bar forming galaxies up to eight or nine billion years ago.
But the increased sensitivity and wavelength range offered by the JWST means researchers have been able to see the phenomenon happening even further back in time.
Of 357 disc galaxies observed, the researchers saw that 20 per cent had bars – three to four times more than observed by Hubble.
The researchers say the fact that galaxies in the early Universe are maturing much faster than thought is a real surprise.
At that stage you would expect the Universe to be very turbulent with lots of collisions between galaxies and a lot of gas that hasn’t yet transformed into stars, but our latest research suggests this isn’t the case.
This means scientists might have to rethink their theories about galaxy evolution in the early stages of the Universe’s formation.
The research is published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
It was led by PhD researcher Zoe Le Conte, working with co-author Dr Dimitri Gadotti, from Durham University’s Centre for Extragalactic Astronomy, Department of Physics.
Read Zoe’s blog about writing her first published paper in The Durham Student.
The latest study also included scientists from Durham University’s Institute for Computational Cosmology, University of Victoria, Canada; Jodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics – University of Manchester, UK; the European Southern Observatory; the Department of Astronomy and Atmospheric Sciences, Kyungpook National University, Republic of Korea; the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy, Germany; Aix Marseille University, France.
The research was funded in the UK by the UKRI-Science and Technology Facilities Council.
Main image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ESO/R. Hurt
The James Webb Space Telescope showing its primary mirror pointing into the cosmos. Researchers used the telescope to find evidence of bar formation in galaxies when the Universe was only a few billion years old. Picture credit: TRW-Ball.
A grey-scale image of the galaxy EGS_31125 at 10.6 billion years ago as seen by the Hubble Space Telescope. The galaxy’s bar of stars cannot be seen. Credit: Zoe Le Conte.
A grey-scale image of the galaxy EGS_31125 at 10.6 billion years ago as seen by the James Webb Space Telescope. The galaxy’s bar can be seen (outlined in the centre image in a thick solid purple line with the spiral arms shown as faint purple lines). Credit: Zoe Le Conte.
Artist’s impression showing the structure of the Milky Way. The bar is the yellowish elongated structure crossing the centre of the galaxy. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ESO/R. Hurt.
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