NASA Telescopes Spot Surprisingly Mature Cluster in Early Universe
Protocluster JADES-ID1
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Credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/CfA/Á Bogdán; Infrared (JWST): NASA/ESA/CSA/STScI;
Image Processing: NASA/CXC/SAO/P. Edmonds and L. Frattare
This graphic represents the discovery of what may be the most distant protocluster ever found, as described in our latest press release. By using NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory together with the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), astronomers have netted an important piece in the history of the universe: when galaxy clusters, the largest structures held together by gravity, begin to form.
The main panel contains an infrared image from the JWST Advanced Deep Extragalactic Survey (JADES), a deep infrared imaging project that used more than a month of the telescope’s observing time. The white box outlines X-rays (blue) seen with Chandra.
The newly-discovered protocluster, dubbed JADES-ID1, is located about 12.7 billion light-years from Earth, or just about a billion years after the big bang. It has a mass of about 20 trillion suns and two important characteristics of a protocluster: a large number of galaxies held together by gravity (Webb sees at least 66 potential members) and a huge cloud of hot gas (detected by Chandra). So that only X-rays from the protocluster are included, only X-rays inside the white box are shown. The annotated version of the image shows circles where astronomers find some of the individual galaxies in JADES-ID1.
Credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/CfA/Á Bogdán; JWST: NASA/ESA/CSA/STScI; Image Processing: NASA/CXC/SAO/P. Edmonds and L. Frattare
Most models of the universe predict that there likely would not be enough time and a large enough density of galaxies for a protocluster of this size to form at this epoch in the early universe. The previous record holder for a protocluster with X-ray emission is seen much later, about three billion years after the big bang. Therefore, the discovery of JADES-ID1 will force scientists to re-examine their ideas for how galaxy clusters — gigantic collections of galaxies, hot gas, and dark matter — first appeared in the universe.
To find JADES-ID1, astronomers combined deep observations from both Chandra and Webb. By design, the JADES field overlaps with the Chandra Deep Field South, the site of the deepest X-ray observation ever conducted. This field is thus one of the few in the entire sky where a discovery such as this could be made. The researchers found five other proto-cluster candidates in the JADES field, but only in JADES-ID1 are the galaxies seen to be embedded in hot gas. Only JADES-ID1 possesses enough mass for an X-ray signal from hot gas to be expected.
A paper describing these results appears in the latest issue of the journal Nature and is available here. The authors of the study are Akos Bogdan and Gerritt Schellenberger (Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian) and Qiong Li and Christopher Conselice (University of Manchester in the United Kingdom).
NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, manages the Chandra program. The Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory's Chandra X-ray Center controls science operations from Cambridge, Massachusetts, and flight operations from Burlington, Massachusetts.