Webb knowledge counsel many early galaxies have been lengthy and skinny, not disk-like or spherical

Columbia researchers analyzing photos from NASA’s James Webb House Telescope have discovered that galaxies within the early universe are sometimes flat and elongated, like breadsticks—and are not often spherical, like balls of pizza dough.

“Roughly 50 to 80% of the galaxies we studied seem like flattened in two dimensions,” defined Viraj Pandya, a NASA Hubble Fellow at Columbia College and the lead writer of a brand new paper slated to seem in The Astrophysical Journal that outlines the findings. The paper is presently published on the arXiv preprint server.

“Galaxies that seem like lengthy, skinny breadsticks appear to be quite common within the early universe, which is shocking since they’re unusual amongst galaxies within the present-day universe.”

The group targeted on an enormous area of near-infrared photos delivered by Webb, generally known as the Cosmic Evolution Early Release Science (CEERS) Survey, plucking out galaxies which might be estimated to have existed when the universe was 600 million to six billion years outdated.

Whereas most distant galaxies seem like breadsticks, others are formed like pizza pies and balls of pizza dough. The “balls of pizza dough,” or sphere-shaped galaxies, seem like the smallest kind of galaxy and have been additionally the least steadily recognized. The pizza pie-shaped galaxies have been discovered to be as giant as breadstick-shaped galaxies alongside their longest axis. “They’re extra frequent within the close by universe, which, because of the universe’s ongoing growth, is made up of older, extra mature galaxies.”

Which class would our Milky Means galaxy fall into if we have been capable of wind the clock again by billions of years? “Our greatest guess is that it might need appeared extra like a breadstick,” mentioned co-author Haowen Zhang, a Ph.D. candidate on the College of Arizona in Tucson. This speculation is predicated partly on new proof from Webb—theorists have “wound again the clock” to estimate the Milky Means’s mass billions of years in the past, which suggests its probably breadstick form within the distant previous.

These distant galaxies are additionally far much less huge than close by spirals and ellipticals—they’re precursors to extra huge galaxies like our personal. “Within the early universe, galaxies had had far much less time to develop,” mentioned Kartheik Iyer, a co-author and NASA Hubble Fellow additionally at Columbia College.

“Figuring out extra classes for early galaxies is thrilling—there’s much more to investigate now. We are able to now examine how galaxies’ shapes relate to how they give the impression of being and higher venture how they shaped in way more element.”

Hubble, the house telescope that launched in 1990 and picked up knowledge to this present day, “has lengthy proven an extra of elongated galaxies,” defined co-author Marc Huertas-Firm, a college analysis scientist on the Institute of Astrophysics on the Canary Islands. However researchers nonetheless questioned: Would extra element present up higher with the sensitivity to infrared gentle that the Webb telescope, which launched in 2021, has?

“Webb confirmed that Hubble did not miss any extra options within the galaxies they each noticed. Plus, Webb confirmed us many extra distant galaxies with related shapes, all in nice element,” Huertas-Firm mentioned.

One query, in fact, is why early galaxies tended to be so flattened and elongated. One speculation, Pandya defined, is that the early universe could have been stuffed with filaments of darkish matter that shaped a form of “skeletal background,” or “cosmic freeway,” that ushered gasoline and stars alongside it. These filaments nonetheless exist however have grown way more diffuse because the universe has expanded, so they might be much less prone to promote the formation of breadstick-shaped galaxies.

The paper is named “Galaxies Going Bananas,” one more meals analogy that sprang into the authors’ minds as they checked out their knowledge. When the authors plotted galaxies’ facet ratios in opposition to their longest axis size, they discovered that the diagrams that emerged regarded distinctly like bananas, a form that displays their elongated ellipsoid (i.e., breadstick) form.

“The bananas are one other approach of claiming that these intrinsically elongated galaxies appear to be the dominant ones within the first 4 billion years of the universe,” Pandya mentioned.

There are nonetheless gaps in our data. Researchers not solely want a fair bigger pattern dimension from Webb to additional refine the properties and exact places of distant galaxies, however they will even have to spend ample time tweaking and updating their fashions to mirror the exact geometries of distant galaxies higher.

“These are early outcomes,” mentioned co-author Elizabeth McGrath, an affiliate professor at Colby School in Waterville, Maine. “We have to delve extra deeply into the information to determine what is going on on, however we’re very enthusiastic about these early traits.”