by A team of international astronomers, including Alexander de la Vega from the University of California, Riverside, has made a groundbreaking discovery using the James Webb Space Telescope. They have found the most distant barred spiral galaxy ever observed, named ceers-2112, which shares similarities with our own Milky Way. This discovery challenges previous beliefs that barred spiral galaxies could not be observed until the universe was at least half of its current age.
The research, led by scientists at the Centro de Astrobiología in Spain, was published in Nature this week. Ceers-2112, which formed shortly after the Big Bang, provides evidence that galaxies in the early universe could exhibit the same level of order as the Milky Way. This is surprising because galaxies during this period were much more chaotic, with very few having structures resembling the Milky Way.
Ceers-2112 features a bar in its center, which is a structure made of stars found within galaxies. These galactic bars, similar to bars in our everyday lives, such as a candy bar, are primarily found in spiral galaxies. Non-spiral galaxies with bars are extremely rare.
De la Vega, a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Physics and Astronomy, explains that the existence of the bar in ceers-2112 suggests that galaxies matured and became ordered at a much faster rate than previously thought. This discovery challenges theories about galaxy formation and evolution, which previously suggested that it took billions of years for galaxies to become ordered enough to develop bars. Ceers-2112 shows that this process can occur in a fraction of that time, in approximately one billion years or less.
According to de la Vega, galactic bars are believed to form spontaneously due to instabilities in the spiral structure or gravitational effects from neighboring galaxies, especially in spiral galaxies where stars rotate in an ordered fashion similar to the Milky Way. It was previously thought that bars could not form or last long in the early universe when galaxies were unstable and chaotic.
The discovery of ceers-2112 is expected to have significant implications for the field of astronomy. First, theoretical models of galaxy formation and evolution will need to be revised to account for galaxies becoming stable enough to host bars very early in the universe’s history. These models may also require adjustments in terms of the amount of dark matter present in galaxies during this period, as dark matter is believed to affect the rate at which bars form. Second, the discovery demonstrates that structures like bars can be detected in the early universe, which is important considering that galaxies during this time were smaller and more challenging to observe. This discovery opens up opportunities for the future detection of additional bars in the young universe.
De la Vega played a crucial role in estimating the redshift and properties of ceers-2112. Redshift is an observable property of a galaxy that indicates its distance and the time period it is being observed from. He was surprised by how well the properties of the bar in ceers-2112 could be determined, despite initial expectations of measurement uncertainties.
At the University of California, Riverside, de la Vega is involved in astronomy outreach, organizing telescope nights on and off campus, visiting local schools to give presentations on astronomy, and leading public astronomy talk series such as Cosmic Thursdays. This discovery further illustrates the importance of engaging the public in the field of astronomy and furthering our understanding of the universe.
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1. Source: Coherent Market Insights, Public sources, Desk research
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