Firefly Sparkle Galaxy: A Glimpse Into the Milky Way's Childhood
Astronomers now get a glimpse of what our Milky Way might have looked like in its early years thanks to a finding made by NASA's James Webb Space Telescope: a newborn galaxy from the early cosmos known as Firefly Sparkle, so named because its gleaming star clusters resemble the bioluminescent bugs.
The galaxy, which is still being assembled, was created 600 million years after the Big Bang event that created the universe, or when the universe was approximately 5% of its present age, according to researchers. It is home to two additional relatively minor galaxies, Firefly-Best Friend and Firefly-New Best Friend, and has a mass equivalent to roughly 10 million stars the size of our sun. It is made up of ten closely spaced star clusters—two along its extended arm and eight in its middle region—embedded in a diffuse arc of stars. It is roughly 1,000 light-years across in its major observable region. The 5.9 trillion miles (9.5 trillion km) that light travels in a year is known as a "light year."
The galaxy is thought to have originated between 100 and 400 million years before Webb, the most powerful space observatory ever put into operation, detected it at its evolutionary stage. As co-lead author of the study published on Wednesday in the journal Nature, astronomer Lamiya Mowla of Wellesley College in Massachusetts and the Center for Astronomy, Space Science and Astrophysics in Bangladesh stated, "The Milky Way began forming very early in the universe's history, likely around the same time as Firefly Sparkle."
We can see directly what galaxies like our Milky Way might have looked like when they were young thanks to this study. We determine through statistical analysis and simulations that the mass of the Firefly Sparkle is in line with what we would anticipate from an early Milky Way ancestor. As is common for galaxies of that era, the galaxy was roughly 10,000 times less massive at this point than the Milky Way today, Mowla continued.
What is the origin of the firefly's name?
"A sparkle is a collection of fireflies, which is how this galaxy appears," Mowla explained. Firefly-New Best Friend is roughly 42,000 light-years away from Firefly Sparkle, while Firefly-Best Friend is roughly 6,500 light-years away. All three would be perfectly contained within the current Milky Way, which is roughly 100,000 light-years across.
Astronomer and study co-lead author Kartheik Iyer, a NASA Hubble Fellow at Columbia University in New York, stated, "We are seeing Firefly Sparkle in its initial formation stages, while the Milky Way continued to grow and evolve over billions of years through mergers with other galaxies and continued star formation."
"Dense gas clouds in the early universe seem to have collapsed to generate early galaxies like Firefly Sparkle. Several potential methods for how stars emerge from gas under the harsh circumstances of the early cosmos are suggested by current theory and simulations. According to our analysis, these galaxies may accumulate by forming huge star clusters in extremely dense and pressured areas The somewhat varying hues of its star clusters show that they did not develop all at once. For example, older stars appear more red, whereas younger, hotter stars appear more blue.
Because light takes so long to travel, Webb has been able to observe galaxies that date back to the cosmic dawn, or the first few hundred million years after the Big Bang, which occurred about 13.8 billion years ago. One of the oldest known low-mass galaxies is Firefly Sparkle, which was discovered by a process known as gravitational lensing. This happens when a big object with a strong gravitational pull, like a galaxy cluster in this case, bends light from farther-off objects behind it from Earth's perspective, functioning as a natural magnifying glass. According to Iyer, the foreground galaxy cluster in this study enhanced Firefly Sparkle's light by roughly 16–26 times, allowing for the observation of details that would otherwise be too weak to view.
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