NASA’s James Webb captures ‘a real monster’ face in deep space: Newly-discovered galaxy spewing out stars has ghoulish formation

NASA's James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has captured images of a “real monster” in deep space, a dusty galaxy that births hundreds of stars every year.

Astronomers at the University of Texas (UT) at Austin have discovered the strange red dot in telescope data, identifying the AzTECC71 galaxy that formed about 900 million years after the Big Bang.

The artistic image of AzTECC71 shows the ghostly object with eyes and a large mouth open as if screaming into the abyss.

All James Webb Space Telescope images are data visualizations recreated by artists and are not actual photographs of the objects depicted.

The discovery could change scientists' understanding of the early universe, as they previously thought massive stellar nurseries were rare – but the galaxy has suggested they may have been three to 10 times more common.

“This thing is a real beast,” said Jed McKinney, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Texas at Austin. Although it looks like a little bubble, it actually forms hundreds of new stars every year.

“The fact that even this extreme object can barely be seen in the most sensitive imaging from our latest telescope is very exciting to me.” It would probably tell us that there was a whole bunch of galaxies that were hiding from us.

McKinney and his team are using NASA data to map the universe for the COSMOS-Web project, which aims to identify up to a million galaxies.

Ground-based telescopes initially picked up the glowing dot of AzTECC71, but it disappeared completely in images from the Hubble Space Telescope.

Dusty galaxies were difficult to capture because much of the light from their stars is absorbed by a veil of dust and re-emitted at redder (or longer) wavelengths.

Astronomers at the University of Texas at Austin have discovered the strange red dot in telescope data, identifying the AzTECC71 galaxy that formed about 900 million years after the Big Bang.

But the James Webb Space Telescope made this possible due to its ability to capture infrared features.

Read more: NASA's James Webb Telescope peeks at potential 'dark stars' for the first time

A team of astronomers led by the University of Texas (UT) at Austin has identified three possible “dark stars” that formed about 320 million years after the Big Bang, making them the oldest stars ever seen by the human eye.

“Until now, the only way we've been able to see galaxies in the early universe is from an optical perspective using Hubble,” McKinney said.

“This means that our understanding of the evolutionary history of galaxies is biased because we only see unobscured, less dusty galaxies.”

The James Clerk Maxwell Telescope in Hawaii was the first to detect AzTECC71 by capturing it at longer wavelengths.

The COSMOS-Web team spotted the object in data collected by another group using the ALMA telescope in Chile, which has higher spatial resolution and can see in infrared.

This allowed them to narrow down the location of the source, and when they looked at James Webb Space Telescope data in the infrared at a wavelength of 4.44 microns, the researchers found a faint galaxy in the same place.

At shorter wavelengths of light, less than 2.7 microns, it was invisible.

The team is now working to discover more of these faint galaxies from the James Webb Space Telescope.

“Using the James Webb Space Telescope, we can for the first time study the optical and infrared properties of these galaxies that are heavily covered in dust, because they are so sensitive that they can't just peer into the furthest reaches of the galaxy,” McKinney said. universe, but it can also penetrate the thickest veils of dust.