- It imaged 14 new transient objects that looked like flickering ‘Christmas lights’
- Cluster of galaxies is called MACS041 and is located 4.3 billion light-years away
With the festive season fast approaching, NASA’s super space telescope is jumping on the Yuletide bandwagon.
James Webb has captured a spectacular view of what astronomers are calling the ‘Christmas Tree Galaxy Cluster’ — a colourful array of cosmic entities with 14 flickering ‘lights’ at their heart.
These newly-discovered lights are actually what are known as transient objects, phenomena which brighten dramatically and then fade away, hence the twinkling.
They were spotted with the help of Webb’s predecessor – the iconic Hubble Space Telescope – and sit within a galaxy cluster 4.3 billion light-years from Earth that is officially known as MACS041.
Better still, astronomers could yet get another early Christmas present because they think there are a lot more of these transients to be discovered within the Christmas Tree Galaxy Cluster.
‘We’re calling MACS0416 the Christmas Tree Galaxy Cluster, both because it’s so colourful and because of the flickering lights we find within it,’ said Haojing Yan, an associate professor in the University of Missouri Department of Physics and Astronomy.
‘Transients are objects in space, like individual stars, that appear to suddenly brighten by orders of magnitudes and then fade away.
‘These transient objects appear bright for only a short period of time and then are gone; it’s like we’re peering through a shifting magnifying glass.’
The astronomers discovered the transients by studying four sets of images taken by Webb over a period of four months.
What proved particularly exciting – as well as the obvious festive nature of the cluster – is that two of these transients are supernovae, which are stars at the end of their lifespans.
This is useful for astronomers because it allows them to study the host galaxies of such phenomena, effectively ‘opening up a completely new view of the universe’.
‘The two supernovae and the other 12 extremely magnified stars are of different nature, but they are all important,’ Yan said.
‘We have traced the change in brightness over time through their light curves, and by examining in detail how the light changes over time, we’ll eventually be able to know what kind of stars they are.
‘More importantly, we’ll be able to understand the detailed structure of the magnifying glass and how it relates to dark matter distribution.’
The astronomers also stumbled across something else extraordinary.
Within one of the galaxies is a monster star which can be seen as it was when the 13.7 billion-year-old universe was a relative youngster, at just three billion years old.
The researchers have named the star ‘Mothra’ – after the monstrous moth, Kaiju, from Japanese cinema – and think it has a mass of between 10,000 and 1 million times that of the sun.
Webb was launched on Christmas Day 2021 with the aim of peering back in time to the dawn of the universe.
To that end, researchers have been able to calculate that the light from the Christmas Tree Galaxy Cluster began its journey to us when our now 4.6 billion-year-old solar system was newly formed and around 300 million years old.
Two papers have been published about the imaging of the cluster.
One is in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics and the other has been accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal, with a preprint available on the research repository arXiv.
Dr. Thomas Hughes is a UK-based scientist and science communicator who makes complex topics accessible to readers. His articles explore breakthroughs in various scientific disciplines, from space exploration to cutting-edge research.
