The 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 observed, HFLS3 is a collision of six young galaxies at the dawn 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 increased markedly and galaxies collided and grew, glowing in the dark. But try to think about the details of 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 the beginning of the dawn of the universe in the age of reionization, producing stars at an astonishing rate of about 3,000 solar masses per year. By comparison, our Milky Way galaxy produces up to 8 solar masses of stars per year. 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 using current theories in cosmology. Subsequent observations by Herschel and the involvement of the other space telescope, Hubble, led us to suspect that HFLS3 is not what it seems. More clarity was provided when the James Webb telescope observed this area of ​​the sky in the fall of 2022.

A team of astrophysicists, led by Oxford University scientist Gareth Jones (Gareth Jones), analyzed data from the HFLS3 observation and prepared a scientific paper, which has not yet been peer-reviewed, to be published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics. arXiv website.

Scientists discovered that HFLS3 consists of three pairs of small galaxies orbiting in a kind of cosmic dance, leading to an inevitable collision of these galaxies in space that is only 36,000 light-years wide. This collision should have occurred within a billion years of observation; This can be considered a very short time period for a major event such as a collision of galaxies.

The galaxies in the pairs are so close together that their gravitational interaction excites star-forming material, causing stars to shine as they form; This explains the extremely high rate of new stars being born. The discovery offers a fascinating view of how galaxies interacted and grew during the period known as the Cosmic Dawn.

“HFLS3 is probably not an extreme burst of star formation, but instead one of the densest groups of interacting star-forming galaxies in the first billion years of the Universe. Scientists shared their analysis in the article.