Webb discovers ‘weird’ galaxy with gas outshining its stars | Science & Technology

GS-NDG-9422 (9422) was found approximately one billion years after the Big Bang and stood out because it has an odd, never-before-seen light signature — indicating that its gas is outshining its stars.

The “totally new phenomena” is significant, researchers say, because it could be the missing-link phase of galactic evolution between the Universe’s first stars and familiar, well-established galaxies.

This extreme class of galaxy was spotted by the $10billion (£7.6billion) James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), a joint endeavour of the US, European and Canadian space agencies, which has been designed to peer back in time to the beginning of the Universe.

Its discovery was made public today in a research paper published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

“My first thought in looking at the galaxy’s spectrum was, ‘that’s weird,’ which is exactly what the Webb telescope was designed to reveal: totally new phenomena in the early Universe that will help us understand how the cosmic story began,” said lead researcher Dr Alex Cameron, of the University of Oxford.

Cameron reached out to colleague Dr Harley Katz, a theorist, to discuss the strange data. Working together, their team found that computer models of cosmic gas clouds heated by very hot, massive stars, to an extent that the gas shone brighter than the stars, was nearly a perfect match to Webb’s observations.

“It looks like these stars must be much hotter and more massive than what we see in the local Universe, which makes sense because the early Universe was a very different environment,” said Katz, of Oxford and the University of Chicago.

In the local Universe, typical hot, massive stars have a temperature ranging between 70,000 to 90,000 degrees Fahrenheit (40,000 to 50,000 degrees Celsius). According to the team, galaxy 9422 has stars hotter…