Galaxies far, far away: Nasa’s Webb telescope finds most distant cluster ever seen by humans

Galaxy cluster will likely grow in size to become a ‘monster’ of modern universe

The most distant cluster of galaxies ever seen by humans has been found by astronomers using Nasa’s James Webb Space Telescope.

The advance sheds more light on the formative years of the early universe.

A cluster of seven galaxies was revealed at a distance astronomers refer to as redshift 7.9, according to the research, published on Monday in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

The discovery showed the formation of the cluster a mere 650 million years after the big bang.

The nascent galaxy cluster will likely grow in size and mass to resemble the Coma Cluster – a “monster” of the modern universe – estimated scientists, including those from the California Institute of Technology in the US.

“This is a very special, unique site of accelerated galaxy evolution, and Webb gave us the unprecedented ability to measure the velocities of these seven galaxies and confidently confirm that they are bound together in a protocluster,” study lead author Takahiro Morishita said in a statement.

Precise measurements of the cluster captured by Webb’s Near-Infrared Spectrograph (NIRSpec) were key to confirming the galaxies’ collective distance and the high velocities at which they are moving, scientists said.

The Webb data allowed researchers to model and map the future development of the cluster to the current time in the modern universe.

The seven galaxies confirmed in the new study were first established as candidates for observation by Webb using data from the Hubble Space Telescope.

Since the Hubble telescope cannot detect light beyond the near-infrared light wavelength, Webb picked up the investigation, focusing on the galaxies scouted by Hubble.

“It is amazing the science we can now dream of doing, now that we have Webb,” said study co-author Tommaso Treu of the University of California, Los Angeles.

With the discovery of this cluster of seven galaxies at such a distance, researchers are hopeful of better understanding the timeline of the universe’s early development.

They predict the newly discovered cluster will eventually be among the densest known galaxy collections having thousands of members with the potential to dramatically warp the fabric of space-time itself.

“We can see these distant galaxies like small drops of water in different rivers, and we can see that eventually, they will all become part of one big, mighty river,” said Benedetta Vulcani, another author of the study from the National Institute of Astrophysics in Italy.