An international team of scientists led by Haojing Yang of the University of Missouri using NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) discovered 14 new transient objects during a slow-motion examination of the MACS0416 galaxy cluster, located approximately 4.3 billion light-years from Earth. these were called the “Christmas Tree Cluster of Galaxies”.

“Transients are objects, like individual stars in space, that suddenly become orders of magnitude brighter and then disappear,” said Yang, an associate professor of physics and astronomy.

“These ephemeral objects appear bright only for a short time and then disappear; It’s as if we were looking through a moving magnifying glass. Right now, we have the rare chance that nature has given us to capture a detailed picture of an individual. Although we can only see the brightest right now, if we do this often enough and for long enough, we can determine how many bright stars are out there. there and how big they are.”

Using JWST’s advanced technological capabilities, Yang and his team, including Mizzou graduate student Bangzheng Sun, confirmed what was behind the “flickering lights,” or transients, in galaxy clusters that scientists first saw with NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope several years ago .

“We call MACS0416 the ‘Christmas Tree’ galaxy cluster because it is very colorful and because of the twinkling lights we find in it,” Yang said. said. “We can see a lot of transients in certain parts of this region due to a phenomenon known as gravitational lensing, which magnifies the galaxies behind this cluster.”

The team discovered the transients by examining four sets of galaxy cluster images taken by JWST over 126 days, or about four months. Ian is particularly excited because two of the transients are supernovae (stars at the end of their life cycles) because the team can use them to study galaxies that host supernovae.

“The two supernovae and the other twelve extremely magnified stars are of different natures, but they are all important,” Yang said. “We tracked the change in brightness over time through light curves, and by studying in detail how the light changes over time we will eventually be able to know what type of stars these are. More importantly, we will be able to understand the detailed structure of the magnifying glass and its relationship to the distribution of dark matter. This is what JWST reveals “It’s a completely new view of the universe.”