Astronomers have discovered a very bright and mysterious object using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). A new study suggests that this object may be a galaxy that emerged just 100 million years after the Big Bang, making it the oldest known galaxy in the universe.
Alternatively, Capotauro could be an unusual brown dwarf (a “failed star” that is more massive than the largest gas planets but not large enough to sustain nuclear fusion) that lives in the outer reaches of the Milky Way, smoldering at just 80 degrees Fahrenheit (27 degrees Celsius).
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“Capotauro, whatever it is, seems really interesting and promising,” co-author Giovanni Gandolfi, an astrophysicist at Italy’s National Institute of Astrophysics, told Live Science.
Capotauro was originally discovered by Gandolfi and his team during an earlier study that sought to identify very old galaxies in JWST observations. But the lack of granular data makes it impossible to narrow down the object’s identity, Gandolfi said, which is similar to finding a piece of DNA at a crime scene but matching it too closely in the FBI’s database to be useful.
Then, in March, JWST released more data about Capotauro, which Gandolfi said was like taking some fingerprints, which helped narrow the list of suspects to just a handful of suspects.
To determine what Capotauro is, the research team measured its brightness using images taken at seven wavelengths by JWST’s Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam) as part of the Cosmic Evolution and Early Emission Science (CEERS) survey. The object was detected only at the two longest NIRCam wavelengths.
They then used limited but more detailed data from JWST’s near-infrared spectrometer (NIRSpec) to better understand Capotauro’s age and body temperature.
Combining NIRCam and NIRSpec data, the researchers used their model to test three possible galaxy configurations and the scenario that Capotauro could be a brown dwarf in the outer edge of the Milky Way. They also tested a variety of other possible scenarios, including that the object was a very strange young galaxy or a strange exoplanet.
The results were inconclusive, meaning the team could not conclusively determine Capotauro’s identity. However, they identified the two most likely options.
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Interpretations of early galaxies consistently find that Capotauro formed about 100 million years after the Big Bang, pushing the age of the oldest known galaxies back by about 200 million years. It’s huge, estimated to have more than a billion solar masses.
Another possibility is that Capotauro is a very rare brown dwarf. If this is true, Capotauro would be the coldest and most distant known brown dwarf in our galaxy, more than seven light-years away, and only 300 degrees Fahrenheit (80 degrees Fahrenheit, or 27 degrees Celsius) away, the researchers wrote in the study. If Capotauro is a primitive brown dwarf, Gandolfi said, scientists have a chance to study the formation of our galaxy.
Both possibilities are “very exciting.” That’s because they challenge what we thought we knew about our galaxies, and how galaxies form and evolve in general, Gandolfi added.
Mohammad Latif, an astrophysicist at United Arab Emirates University who was not involved in the study, said Kapotauro was “one of the most puzzling discoveries” of JWST to date.
“It’s a very interesting object in the sense that no matter how you interpret it, it basically pushes the limits of our knowledge to the limit,” he told Live Science.
Latif said more precise data on the light emitted by Kapotauro is needed to determine its exact characteristics. Gandolfi added that the team has submitted a request to JWST to collect more data about the mysterious object and is scanning other regions of the universe for similar-looking objects.
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