The world’s most advanced space telescope, the James Webb Space Telescope, has discovered an ancient “ghost” of the universe named RX J2129-z95, originating from a world that is only 510 million years old after the Big Bang.
It is a ghost that transcends time in the literal sense, as the light from this object took billions of years to travel the distance to the lens of James Webb orbiting Earth, losing that many years in the process.
The images collected are from a time 13.3 billion years ago (the universe is approximately 13.8 billion years old). In the present, RX J2129-z95 may have long since vanished.
RX J2129-z95 is a small galaxy in the process of star formation, one of the “ancestors” of the universe.
RX J2129-z95 tripled (G1, G2, and G3) in James Webb data – (Photo: NASA/ESA/CSA).
“The volume of this galaxy is about one-millionth that of the Milky Way, but we can see that it is still forming with a certain number of stars each year,” said Dr. Patrick Kelly, an astronomer from the University of Minnesota, the lead author of the new study.
According to Sci-News, it has a diameter of about 106 light-years. In comparison, the galaxy that contains Earth, the Milky Way, has a diameter of at least 100,000 light-years, not including its halo.
The “ghost” recently “unearthed” from this ancient world does not appear alone; rather, it puzzles astronomers with three different duplicated images.
Only one is real, while the other two are its reflected shadows. This phenomenon occurs because James Webb observed this ancient object through a region of spacetime distorted by the gravitational field of a closer object, known as “gravitational lensing.”
This gravitational lensing is caused by a massive galaxy cluster, amplifying the light from the tiny and ancient object by 20 times its actual brightness.
This discovery helps scientists gain further insights into the first galaxies of the universe, marking the beginning of a process of formation, destruction, merging, and more, contributing to the diverse world of galaxies that followed.
Providing a view of these galaxies for scientists worldwide to study is also a primary mission of James Webb, a project costing over $9 billion developed and primarily operated by NASA, with support from two European-Canadian space agencies, ESA and CSA.
The new study on RX J2129-z95 has just been published in the scientific journal Science.
