A cluster of stars in the Small Magellanic Cloud, captured by the James Webb Space Telescope, can tell us more about the Cosmic Noon
(Picture: NASA)The James Webb Space Telescope has captured images of an area of space that can tell us more about the formation of the universe.
This area is the NGC 246 dwarf galaxy, which sits in the Small Magellanic Cloud, more than 200,000 light years from Earth.
It is packed with clouds of dust and hydrogen, which are the precursors of the formation of stars and planets.
“We’re seeing the building blocks, not only of stars, but also potentially of planets,” says THE European Space Agency’s researcher Guido De Marchi.
These conditions are comparable to those of the Cosmic Noon, when the universe was two to three billions years old. It is estimated to be 13.7 billion years old at present.
A view of a younger universe
Cosmic Noon was a vigorous era for star formation. “A galaxy during Cosmic Noon wouldn’t have one NGC 346 like the Small Magellanic Cloud does; it would have thousands of star-forming regions like this one,” says Universities Space Research Association astronomer Margaret Meixner, who is a principal investigator.
“But even if NGC 346 is now the one and only massive cluster furiously forming stars in its galaxy, it offers us a great opportunity to probe conditions that were in place at Cosmic Noon.”
“Since the Small Magellanic Cloud has a similar environment to galaxies during Cosmic Noon, it’s possible that rocky planets could have formed earlier in the universe than we might have thought,” explains De Marchi.
The colourful swirls seen in the telescope’s images are gas plumes. Pink arcs are energised hydrogen, which may be as hot as 10,000 °C according to Nasa. The orange shapes are much more dense molecular hydrogen, as cold as -200 °C.
These images were published within a day of the James Webb Space Telescope’s discovery of an Earth-size planet, a mere 41 light years away.
The first images captured using the telescope were published in July 2022, roughly six months after it reached its operating position orbiting the sun, almost a million miles from Earth. It is able to see faint infra-red light from distant galaxies, light that has travelled for more than13 billion years, a time when the universe was in its infancy.
