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Distant sparkles hint at how the Milky Way formed

The JWST has captured images of the Firefly Sparkle — a galaxy that resembles an early Milky Way — in the process of being assembled from star clusters. The discovery could help to reveal how the Milky Way formed in the early Universe.
By
  1. Brian Welch

    1. Brian Welch is in the Department of Astronomy, University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland 20742, USA, and at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland, USA.

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The Milky Way formed around 13.5 billion years ago, but it’s not possible to travel back in time to see exactly how it happened. Studies of the Galaxy’s ancient stars1 offer some clues, as do simulations2, but the observable light from our cosmic home was emitted too recently to enable astronomers to examine its beginnings directly. One way around this problem is to study other galaxies that resemble the Milky Way. Writing in Nature, Mowla et al.3 used observations from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) to investigate a distant galaxy with a mass that matches the expected mass of the Milky Way shortly after its formation in the early Universe.

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Nature 636, 305-306 (2024)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-024-03849-6

References

  1. Xiang, M. & Rix, H.-W. Nature 603, 599–603 (2022).

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  2. Pillepich, A. et al. Mon. Not. R. Astron. Soc. 535, 1721–1762 (2024).

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  3. Mowla, L. et al. Nature 636, 332–336 (2024).

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  4. Adamo, A. et al. Nature 632, 513–516 (2024).

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

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Competing Interests

The author declares no competing interests.

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