US EditionWebb Telescope Detects Evidence of Supermassive Stars
Galaxy GS-NDG-9422, about 1 billion years post-Big Bang, shows nebular gas brighter than stars due to intense heating by very hot, massive stars, indicating a brief star formation phase.
- On Wednesday, astronomers using NASA's James Webb Space Telescope revealed galaxy GS-NDG-9422, seen about one billion years after the Big Bang, where nebular gas outshines its stars and may mark a missing-link phase.
- Alex Cameron, lead researcher, University of Oxford, and Harley Katz, theorist, found computer models of heated cosmic gas clouds nearly perfectly match Webb's observations, suggesting 9422 is in intense star formation.
- Spectra show highly ionized gas, meaning atoms stripped of electrons, with nebular emission rapidly swirling around a compact central region, signaling an accreting supermassive black hole.
- The authors published the work in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society and plan further JWST and Atacama Large Millimetre/submillimetre Array observations; Alex Cameron said, `We are just at the beginning of new discoveries and understanding.`
- Population III stars are the universe's first generation, and if supermassive primordial stars existed, they could explain rapid supermassive black hole growth in early cosmic history.
22 Articles
22 Articles
Astronomers may have glimpsed evidence of the biggest stars ever seen
The distant universe might be littered with supermassive stars between 1000 and 10,000 times the mass of the sun, which could solve a cosmic mystery about the origins of extremely large black holes
In odd galaxy, NASA's Webb finds potential missing link to first stars
Looking deep into the early universe with NASA's James Webb Space Telescope, astronomers have found something unprecedented: a galaxy with an odd light signature, which they attribute to its gas outshining its stars. Found approximately one billion years after the big bang, galaxy GS-NDG-9422 (9422) may be a missing-link phase of galactic evolution between the universe's first stars and familiar, well-established galaxies.
Science Alert
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Astronomers Spot "First Stars" Billions of Years After They Were Supposed to Die
Over the course of billions of years, the universe has steadily been evolving. Thanks to the expansion of the universe, we are able to “see” back in time to watch that evolution, almost from the beginning. But every once in a while we see something that doesn’t fit into our current understanding of how the universe should operate. That’s the case for a galaxy described in a new paper by PhD student Sijia Cai of Tsinghua University’s Department o…
The discovery represents a key piece of the puzzle about the formation of early galaxies and black holes.
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