At a time when the universe was 25% of its present age, new images from NASA's James Webb Space Telescope reveal for the first time galaxies with stellar bars. Astrophysicists will need to refine their theories of galaxy evolution after the discovery of barred galaxies.
Images from the Hubble Space Telescope were never able to detect bars. In a Hubble image, there is a disk-shaped smudge, but in the same image taken this past summer, there is a beautiful spiral galaxy with a clear stellar bar.
The professor of astronomy at The University of Texas at Austin said that she looked at the data and said that they were dropping everything else. She described the data from the Cosmic Evolution Early Release Science Survey (CEERS), led by UT Austin professor, Steven Finkelstein, as showing the tremendous power of the Hubble data to see the underlying structure.
The team was able to identify another barred galaxy from about 11 billion years ago, EGS 2468.
They show examples of four other barred galaxies from more than 8 billion years ago in an article accepted for publication.
"For this study, we are looking at a new regime where no one had used this kind of data or done this kind of quantitative analysis before," said Yuchen "KAY" Guo, a graduate student who led the analysis. It's like going into a forest that has never been entered before.
Bars play an important role in the evolution of the universe.
The supply chain problem is solved by bars. "Just like we need to bring raw material from the harbor to inland factories that make new products, a bar powerfully transports gas into the central region where the gas is quickly converted into new stars at a rate typically 10 to 100 times faster than in the rest of the galaxy"
Bars help to grow super massive black holes in the center of the universe.
The discovery of bars shakes up scenarios about the evolution of the universe.
The discovery of early bars means that models of galaxy evolution now have a way to speed up the production of new stars.
The existence of these early bars challenges theoretical models as they need to get the physics right in order to predict the correct amount of bars. Different models will be tested in the next paper.
The bigger mirror of the JWST allows it to see farther and with higher resolution than Hubble. It can see through dust at longer wavelength than Hubble.
In order to narrow the list to a few dozen for the other researchers to analyze with a more intensive mathematical approach, undergraduate students were able to visually review hundreds of galaxies, searching for those that appeared to have bars.
The first look at 1 Bars in the Rest-Frame Near-Infrared with arXiv is available. There is a book titled "arxiv.2210.08658."
Journal information: Astrophysical Journal Letters , arXiv
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