Space Observatory named after James Webb made one of the most important discoveries in astronomy in recent years. It turns out that the largest ancient galaxy, HFLS3, discovered in 2013 and only 880 million years old, is not what scientists said. As Webb observes, HFLS3 is a collision of six young galaxies since the beginning of time.

The early universe was a time of turbulent events. In the first 2 billion years after the Big Bang, about 13.8 billion years ago, star formation became noticeably more active, and galaxies collapsed into darkness, colliding and growing. But try to look at the details in our time! It is not surprising that the imperfection of scientific instruments does not always allow us to understand what is happening in certain areas of space at a particular time.

The discovery of the HFLS3 “galaxy” in 2013 stunned scientists. The object was discovered with data from the Herschel space telescope. This was at the very beginning of the birth of the Universe in the era of reionization, causing stars to be born at an incredible rate – about 3000 solar masses per hour. By comparison, our Milky Way galaxy is producing stars at a rate of up to 8 solar masses per hour. And this is despite the fact that HFLS3 and the Milky Way have approximately the same mass.

What happened in HFLS3 could not be explained with the help of modern cosmological theories. Subsequent observations by Herschel and the involvement of the second space telescope, Hubble, made it possible to suspect that HFLS3 is not what it seems. It became clearer when the James Webb telescope observed this part of the sky in the fall of 2022.

A team of astrophysicists, led by Oxford University scientist Gareth Jones, analyzed HFLS3 observation data and prepared a scientific paper that has not yet been peer-reviewed for publication in a journal. Astronomy and Astrophysics and is available on the website arXiv.

Scientists discovered that HFLS3 consists of three pairs of small galaxies spinning in a strange cosmic dance, leading them to an inevitable collision in space just 36,000 light-years away. This collision should have occurred within a billion years of observation; This can be considered a very short period of time for such a spectacular event as the collision of galaxies.

Galaxies in pairs are so close together that their gravitational interactions mix star-forming materials and cause them to glow during star formation, which also explains the extremely high rate at which new stars are born. The discovery offers a fascinating view of how galaxies interacted and grew during the period known as the Cosmic Dawn.

“HFLS3 is likely not an extreme burst of star formation, but instead represents one of the densest groups of interacting star-forming galaxies in the first billion years of the universe. Recent and ongoing high-resolution observations… will help better characterize this unique region.” – scientists shared their analysis in the article.