Sisters of the milky way? They discover two galaxies 11,000 million light years away

Previously, the Hubble Space Telescope would have captured a galaxy, EGS-23205, it was only possible to appreciate a disk-shaped spot. Thanks to the resolution and sensitivity, the James Webb telescope allows us to observe more distant objects in the universe, such as the formation of the first galaxies.

The telescope James Webb (JWST for its acronym in English) showed for the first time two galaxies with stellar bars, with a great similarity to the Milky Way, these two discoveries generate the redefinition of the theories of the evolution of galaxies by astrophysicists.

EGS-23205 and EGS-24268

Galaxies recognized as EGS-23205 and EGS-24268 remain 11 billion light-years away, this translates to when the universe was only 25% of its present age. Sidebars are essential in the evolution of galaxies to channel gas towards the central regions, this drives the formation of stars, they also help the growth of supermassive black holes that are normally located in the center of galaxies to channel gas into certain part of the way.

“The bars solve the supply chain problem in galaxies,” said Shardha Jogee, a professor of astronomy at the University of Texas at Austin. “Just like we need to get raw materials from the port to inland factories making new products, a rod transports gas with force to the Midwest, where the gas rapidly turns into new stars at a rate typically 10 to 100 times faster than in the rest of the galaxy. The bars also help supermassive black holes grow.

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A new question about evolution

“This discovery of the first bars means that models of galaxy evolution now have a new path through the bars to accelerate the production of new stars at early epochs,” added Jogee.

Eden Wise and Zilei Chen are undergraduate students, who took it upon themselves to visually review hundreds of galaxies, looking for the ones that appeared to have bars, the possible candidates narrowed down significantly by the work of other researchers who used a more rigorous mathematical approach.

“For this study, we are looking for a new regimen where no one has ever used this kind of data or done that kind of quantitative analysis before,” said Yuchen “Kay” Guo, a graduate student who led the data analysis for this study. .

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