Astronomers at The University of Manchester have played a leading role in the discovery of a new cosmic object that is much larger than anything astronomers have seen before in the distant universe.
Image of the JADES-ID1 system, with the blue diffuse light showing the location of the diffuse X-ray emission observed with Chandra and the circles showing the location of galaxies discovered with JWST. Image Credit: NASA Chandra/STScI, Bodgan et al.
This new discovery captures the cosmic moment when a galaxy cluster – among the largest structures in the universe – started to assemble only about a billion years after the big bang, one or two billion years earlier than previously thought possible. This result, made using NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and James Webb Space Telescope, is described in a paper published today (28 January) in the journal Nature.
The findings will require astronomers to rethink when and how the largest structures in the universe formed.
“This may be the most distant confirmed protocluster ever seen,” said Akos Bogdan of the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian (CfA) who led the new Nature study. “JADES-ID1 is giving us new evidence that the universe was in a huge hurry to grow up.”
The object is known as JADES-ID1 for its location in the “JWST Advanced Deep Extragalactic Survey”, or JADES. It has a mass about 20 trillion times that of the Sun. Astronomers classify JADES-ID1 as a “protocluster” because it is currently undergoing an early, violent phase of formation and will one day turn into a galaxy cluster.
This object was first discovered and reported in an earlier study led by The University of Manchester’s Qiong Li using deep JWST data, which was published last year in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
JADES-ID1 is found at a much larger distance – corresponding to a much earlier time in the universe – than astronomers expected for such systems, providing a new mystery of how something so massive could form so quickly.
Galaxy clusters contain hundreds or even thousands of individual galaxies immersed in enormous pools of superheated gas, along with large amounts of unseen dark matter. Astronomers use galaxy clusters to measure the expansion of the universe and the roles of dark energy and dark matter, among other important cosmic studies.
“It’s very important to actually see when and how galaxy clusters grow,” said co-author Gerrit Schellenberger, also of CfA. “It’s like watching an assembly line make a car, rather than just trying to figure out how a car works by looking at the finished product.”
The Chandra and Webb data reveal that JADES-ID1 contains the two properties that confirm the presence of a protocluster: a large number of galaxies held together by gravity. Webb sees at least 66 potential members that are also sitting in a huge cloud of hot gas detected by Chandra. As a galaxy cluster forms, gas falls inward and is heated by shock waves, reaching temperatures of millions of degrees and glowing in X-rays.
What makes JADES-ID1 exceptional is the remarkably early time when it appears in cosmic history. Most models of the universe predict that there likely would not be enough time and a large enough density of galaxies for a protocluster of this size to form only a billion years after the big bang. The previous record holder for a protocluster with X-ray emission is seen much later, about three billion years after the big bang.
“We thought we’d find a protocluster like this two or three billion years after the big bang – not just one billion,” said Qiong Li from The University of Manchester. “Before, astronomers found surprisingly large galaxies and black holes not long after the big bang, and now we’re finding that clusters of galaxies can also grow rapidly.” This is yet another sign that structure in the universe is forming much quicker than astronomers had anticipated.
After billions of years JADES-ID1 should evolve from a protocluster into a massive galaxy cluster like those we see much closer to Earth.
To find JADES-ID1, astronomers combined deep observations from both Chandra and Webb. By design, the JADES field overlaps with the Chandra Deep Field South, the site of the deepest X-ray observation ever conducted. This field is thus one of the few in the entire sky where a discovery such as this could be made.
In an earlier study, a team of researchers led by Li and Professor Conselice at The University of Manchester found five other proto-cluster candidates in the JADES field, but only in JADES-ID1 are the galaxies embedded in hot gas. Thus, only JADES-ID1 possesses enough mass for an X-ray signal from hot gas to be expected.
“Unique discoveries like this are made when two powerful telescopes like the Chandra and James Webb Space Telescopes stare at the same patch of sky at the limit of their observing capabilities,” said co-author Christopher Conselice, Professor of Extragalactic Astronomy at TheUniversity of Manchester. “A challenge for us now is to understand how this protocluster was able to form so quickly, which will require further research and thought.”
NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, manages the Chandra program. The Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory's Chandra X-ray Center controls science operations from Cambridge, Massachusetts, and flight operations from Burlington, Massachusetts. The JWST work was sponsored by the European Research Council in an Advanced Grant (EPOCHS) to The University of Manchester.