The Webb telescope captures the residual spectrum of some galaxies 1:01

(CNN) --

Astronomers have discovered the oldest "dead" galaxy ever observed while studying the cosmos with the James Webb Space Telescope, and it is one of the deepest views of the distant universe made with the observatory to date.

The galaxy existed when the universe was only about 700 million years old at its current age of about 13.8 billion years.

But something caused the galaxy to suddenly stop star formation almost as quickly as star birth began more than 13 billion years ago, and researchers still haven't discovered the cause.

A report describing the discovery appeared Wednesday in the journal Nature.

According to the authors, studying the galaxy could reveal new insights into the early universe and the factors that affect star formation within galaxies.

"The first few hundred million years of the universe were a very active phase, with many gas clouds collapsing to form new stars," the study's lead author, Tobias Looser, a doctoral student in extragalactic astrophysics at the Institute, said in a statement. Kavli of Cosmology at the University of Cambridge.

"Galaxies need a rich supply of gas to form new stars, and the early universe was like an all-you-can-eat buffet."

The research team was surprised to find a dead galaxy that essentially lived fast and died young so soon after the Big Bang that created the universe.

advertising

A new image taken by the James Webb Space Telescope reveals a "dead" galaxy, called JADES-GS-z7-01-QU, in the distant universe.

JADES Collaboration

"It's usually only later in the universe that we start to see galaxies stop forming stars, whether due to a black hole or something else," said study co-author Dr. Francesco D'Eugenio, an astrophysicist and postdoctoral research associate at the Kavli Institute of Cosmology, in a statement.

What causes the death of galaxies?

Star formation ceases when environmental factors deprive a galaxy of the gas necessary to support the birth of new stars.

Supermassive black holes or violent interactions of stars may be to blame for ejecting gas from galaxies, quickly stopping star formation.

Or, the act of birth of a star may consume so much gas that there is no time to replenish it enough to ensure that the process continues into the future.

"We're not sure if any of those scenarios can explain what we've seen now with Webb," said study co-author Roberto Maiolino, professor of experimental astrophysics at the Cavendish Laboratory and the Kavli Institute of Cosmology at the University of Cambridge. in a statement.

“Until now, to understand the early universe, we have used models based on the modern universe.

But now that we can look much further back in time and see that star formation died out so quickly in this galaxy, models based on the modern universe may need to be revised,” Maiolino added.

Webb's observations revealed that the newly discovered galaxy, called JADES-GS-z7-01-QU, experienced a brief, energetic burst of star formation that lasted between 30 and 90 million years before star birth suddenly stopped. .

"Everything seems to happen faster and more dramatically in the early universe, and that could include galaxies going from a star-forming phase to a quiescent or quenched phase," Looser said.

An unusual observation

The dead galaxy revealed by the study is not the first that astronomers have found, but it is the oldest observed so far.

What's more, the galaxy also had a low mass, similar to a dwarf galaxy near the Milky Way known as the Small Magellanic Cloud, which is still forming new stars.

The previously observed dead galaxies were much larger, adding another wrinkle to Webb's discovery.

The newly discovered galaxy is billions of light years from Earth.

A light year is the distance a ray of light travels in one year, or more than 9.46 trillion kilometers.

So the Webb is essentially observing the galaxy as it existed in the past, and astronomers have not ruled out the possibility that it has essentially been resurrected and started star formation again.

"We are looking for other galaxies like this in the early universe, which will help us impose some constraints on how and why galaxies stop forming new stars," D'Eugenio said.

"It could be the case that galaxies in the early universe 'die' and then come back to life; we will need more observations to help us figure this out."

Webb Telescope