An international team of astronomers has discovered a cluster of galaxies merging around a supermassive black hole. The surprising discovery was made possible by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). It represents a chance to observe how early galaxies merged to form the universe of today.

Their work is discussed in the study, titled "First results from the JWST Early Release Science Program Q3D: Turbulent times in the life of a z \sim 3 extremely red quasar revealed by NIRSpec IFU," which is published in Astrophysical Journal Letters that is now available on the arXiv paper repository.

James Webb Space Telescope Reveals Unprecedented Glimpse of Galaxies Merging in a Surprising Discovery
(Photo: ESA/WEBB, NASA & CSA, D. WYLEZALEK, A. VAYNER & THE Q3D TEAM, N. ZAKAMSKA.)
A Hubble image of the quasar and the same area viewed with the James Webb Space Telescope. The Webb image shows multiple galaxies coalescing, with each color representing a different velocity: Red is moving away from us. Blue is moving toward us.


Black Hole in Formation

The team observed the blindingly bright quasar and extremely red quasar called SDSS J165202.64+172852.3, which is about 11.5 billion years old and one of the most powerful ever seen at such distance, and described it as a black hole in formation.

"We think something dramatic is about to happen in these systems," astrophysicist Andrey Vayner, a study co-author from Johns Hopkins University in Maryland, said in a press release statement. "The galaxy is at this perfect moment in its lifetime, about to transform and look entirely different in a few billion years."

JWST was launched in December 2021 and is currently the largest, most powerful telescope ever sent to space. The quasar imagery is one of the 13 early-look projects scientists selected through a highly competitive competition to decide where to point the telescope during its first months of operation, EurekAlert! reported.

Although earlier observations of NASA and ESA's Hubble Space Telescope and the Gemini-North telescope's Near-Infrared Integral Field Spectrometer instrument showed the quasar's location and hinted at a possible galaxy transition, JWST had made an incredible job at imaging it that revealed at least three swirling galaxies in the region.

Astrophysicist Nadia L. Zakamska, another study co-principal investigator, noted that previous images showed hints that the galaxy was interacting with other galaxies on the path of merging because of their distorted shapes. But Webb's data revealed greater detail that they had to spend weeks analyzing it.

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Merging Galaxies

The JWST picture of the region showed three galaxies moving quickly, which implies the presence of a tremendous mass that could be the densest area of galaxy formation in the early universe, Space.com reported.

Astronomer Dominika Wylezalek from Heidelberg University in Germany, who led the research, said that they think it could be a region where two massive halos of dark matter are merging. Vayner was also shocked that JWST has produced observations of the region with such clarity even though it has only started sending images back to Earth in July.

They will attempt to follow up this observation of the cluster of galaxies to decipher the mechanism behind the dense groupings of galaxies that formed in the early universe and understand how the supermassive black holes could have affected this process.

Zakamska said that there is too much going on in the region, and what is shown in the image is just a small subset of the data set. Every blob represents a galaxy merging into another, as evident in the different colors that symbolize different velocities, which means that the whole thing is moving in a complicated way.

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