Massive 5 star clusters discovered from the era when Universe was infant
Astronomers have discovered five young star clusters, and possibly the oldest star clusters ever, born from the time when the Universe was an infant.
Moreover, these gravitationally-bound massive clusters could hold some vital clues about the reionization era of the Universe, the international team led by Stockholm University and collaborators from select European countries, US and Japan, have claimed.
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“This is the first discovery of star clusters in an infant galaxy less than 500 million years after the Big Bang,” said a statement released by the European Space Agency (ESA) on Monday.
Our universe is 13.6 billion years old whereas the Earth is 4.5 billion years old; and the newly discovered star clusters are believed to have been born when the Universe was 460 million years old.
For several centuries now, scientists world over have been trying to look back in time and understand how the early stars were born and what these baby stars looked like. But the cosmological distances have prevented any direct study or observations of these stellar objects. The newest star clusters were discovered in the Cosmic Gems arc — a galaxy emitting light and looking back 97 per cent across the cosmic time.
The Cosmic Gems arc was initially discovered in the images obtained from the Hubble Space Telescope during the Reionization Lensing Cluster Survey programme of the lensing galaxy cluster SPT-CL J0615−5746.
The images captured by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) facilitated the astronomers to peer into the early Universe.
The newly detected clusters in the arc are massive, dense and located in a very small region of their galaxy. They contribute the majority of the ultraviolet light coming from their host galaxy. The clusters are significantly denser than nearby star clusters, the study noted.
In the early Universe, young galaxies underwent a significant burst phase which resulted in the generation of substantial amounts of ionising radiation.
In our galaxy, the Milky Way, there are many ancient globular clusters of stars bound by gravity, which have survived for billions of years. These are old relics of intense star formation in the early Universe, but it is not well understood where and when these clusters got formed.
This detection of massive young star clusters in the arc holds potential to usher in a series of studies on early stages of a star formation process and the subsequent development into globular clusters. The discovery is vital as scientists will be able to better understand how and where infant galaxies were born.
“These galaxies are thought to be a prime source of the intense radiation that re-ionised the early Universe,” said Angela Adamo, Stockholm University, and the lead author of the paper published in the journal Nature.
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