Nasa’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has for the first time captured an image of what our galaxy likely looked like just as it was forming – and it’s got space scientists feeling very Christmassy.
“I just love the sparkle galaxy with its Christmas lights shining as it was when the Universe was just 600 million years old,” Prof Catherine Heymans, Scotland’s Astronomer Royal, told BBC News.
The image shows ten balls of stars of different colours, appearing like Christmas tree baubles hanging in the cosmos.
It’s the first time that scientists have witnessed clumps of stars assembling to form a galaxy like our own Milky Way and holds clues as to how the Universe was formed.
Scientists have named the distant galaxy Firefly Sparkle, because it also looks like a swarm of multi-coloured fireflies.
From its orbit in space unhindered by Earth’s atmosphere, the most powerful telescope ever built has already shown us more distant and therefore older galaxies, but not one like our own in the early stages of forming and not in such detail.
“The data of what happened at this stage of the Universe is very sparse,” according to Dr Lamiya Mowla of Wellesley College in Massachusetts, who co-led the research.
“But here, we are actually watching a galaxy as it is being formed brick by brick. The galaxies we normally see around us are already formed so this is the first time we have seen this process,” she told BBC News.
Prof Heymans, Scotland’s Astronomer Royal, who is independent of the research team, described the discovery as “gorgeous, scientifically important and extremely festive”.
“I find it amazing that humans have built
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