Andromeda’s Galaxy at Arm’s Length may have won an award, but ‘The Sparkler Galaxy’ captured by the James Webb Space Telescope is just as dazzling. Researchers from the Canadian NIRISS Unbiased Cluster Survey (CANUCS) team identified the most distant globular clusters ever discovered, including this sparkling galaxy located 9 billion light-years from Earth, which got its name from compact objects appearing as sparkling small yellow-red dots surrounding it.
The research team believe these sparkles found in JWST’s first deep field image could either be young clusters actively forming stars — born 3-billion years after the Big Bang at the height of star formation — or ancient globular clusters. Globular clusters are essentially old collections of stars from a galaxy’s infancy and contain clues about its earliest phases of formation and growth.
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JWST was built to find the first stars and the first galaxies and to help us understand the origins of complexity in the universe, such as the chemical elements and the building blocks of life. This discovery in Webb’s First Deep Field is already providing a detailed look at the earliest phase of star formation, confirming the incredible power of JWST,” said Lamiya Mowla, Dunlap Fellow at the Dunlap Institute for Astronomy & Astrophysics in the Faculty of Arts & Science at the University of Toronto.
