Webb Telescope Detects Evidence of Supermassive Stars
Galaxy GS-NDG-9422, about 1 billion years post-Big Bang, shows nebular gas brighter than stars due to intense heating by very hot, massive stars, indicating a brief star formation phase.
- On Wednesday, astronomers using NASA's James Webb Space Telescope revealed galaxy GS-NDG-9422, seen about one billion years after the Big Bang, where nebular gas outshines its stars and may mark a missing-link phase.
- Alex Cameron, lead researcher, University of Oxford, and Harley Katz, theorist, found computer models of heated cosmic gas clouds nearly perfectly match Webb's observations, suggesting 9422 is in intense star formation.
- Spectra show highly ionized gas, meaning atoms stripped of electrons, with nebular emission rapidly swirling around a compact central region, signaling an accreting supermassive black hole.
- The authors published the work in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society and plan further JWST and Atacama Large Millimetre/submillimetre Array observations; Alex Cameron said, 'We are just at the beginning of new discoveries and understanding.'
- Population III stars are the universe's first generation, and if supermassive primordial stars existed, they could explain rapid supermassive black hole growth in early cosmic history.
22 Articles
22 Articles
Astronomers may have glimpsed evidence of the biggest stars ever seen
The distant universe might be littered with supermassive stars between 1000 and 10,000 times the mass of the sun, which could solve a cosmic mystery about the origins of extremely large black holes
In odd galaxy, NASA's Webb finds potential missing link to first stars
Looking deep into the early universe with NASA's James Webb Space Telescope, astronomers have found something unprecedented: a galaxy with an odd light signature, which they attribute to its gas outshining its stars. Found approximately one billion years after the big bang, galaxy GS-NDG-9422 (9422) may be a missing-link phase of galactic evolution between the universe's first stars and familiar, well-established galaxies.
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A fast-growing supermassive black hole in the early universe
The James Webb Space Telescope captured this image of galaxies floating through space. At top is a Little Red Dot, indicated by the arrow. (See closeup below.) It’s an extremely distant galaxy, which we see only 570 million years after the Big Bang. At the core of the galaxy is a supermassive black hole that is unusually large for the young universe. Image via ESA/ Webb, NASA & CSA, G. Rihtaršic (University of Ljubljana, FMF), R. Tripodi (Univer…
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