Deepest views from the James Webb and Chandra telescopes reveal monster objects that defy theory — Space Photo of the Week

This astonishing image shows what astronomers believe to be the most distant primordial cluster of galaxies ever discovered, and contains extremely important clues about the history of the universe.

Located 12.7 billion light-years from Earth, the protostar cluster called JADES-ID1 appears in this image as a collection of glowing points and specks embedded in a large blue cloud.

A primordial galaxy cluster is simply a galaxy cluster that is in its infancy. It is a region with large numbers of young galaxies contained within large clouds of hot gas and pulled together by gravity. Galaxy clusters are vast collections of hundreds to thousands of galaxies held together by gravity, and protoclusters essentially demonstrate how such large structures form and grow.

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However, in primordial clusters, galaxies are not as tightly coupled as in mature clusters. Additionally, the surrounding hot gas that usually makes clusters easier to spot isn’t developed enough to emit detectable X-rays. Therefore, detection of primordial clusters is difficult.

Scientists discovered JADES-ID1 using the deepest observations made by two powerful telescopes: the Chandra X-ray Observatory and the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). JWST’s infrared instruments detected at least 66 galaxies held together by gravity in this region. Because JADES-ID1 had enough mass to heat the surrounding gas to very high temperatures, Chandra detected X-ray emissions from the large cloud of hot gas containing all these galaxies. This provided further evidence that these galaxies are part of a single entity.

In the annotated version of the image, some of the individual galaxies identified by JWST’s infrared observations are circled. The neon blue regions represent hot gases detected by Chandra in X-rays.

The real mystery surrounding this discovery is its place in the chronology of the history of the universe. Astronomers discovered that JADES-ID1 has the mass of 20 trillion suns and is about 1.1 million light-years in diameter. Most models of the universe predict that such massive protoclusters won’t form until 2 to 3 billion years after the Big Bang. However, surprisingly, JADES-ID1 is estimated to have existed when the universe was only about 1 billion years old.

“This may be the most distant protostar cluster ever identified,” study lead author Akos Bogdan of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) said in a statement. “JADES-ID1 is giving us new evidence that the universe was growing rapidly.”

Astronomers are now interested in how this protocluster formed so quickly. That’s because, according to current models, there would not have been enough time or enough galaxies in the first billion years of the universe for primordial galaxy clusters of this size to assemble.

The study was published in the journal Nature on January 28th.

For more sublime space images, check out this week’s space photo archive.