Roman space telescope6/5/2023 “We can see these distant galaxies like small drops of water in different rivers, and we can see that eventually they will all become part of one big, mighty river,” said Benedetta Vulcani of the National Institute of Astrophysics in Italy, another member of the research team. The prediction that the protocluster will eventually resemble the Coma Cluster means that it could eventually be among the densest known galaxy collections, with thousands of members. The spectral data allowed astronomers to model and map the future development of the gathering group, all the way to our time in the modern universe. The precise measurements captured by Webb’s Near-Infrared Spectrograph (NIRSpec) were key to confirming the galaxies’ collective distance and the high velocities at which they are moving within a halo of dark matter – more than two million miles per hour (about one thousand kilometers per second). “This is a very special, unique site of accelerated galaxy evolution, and Webb gave us the unprecedented ability to measure the velocities of these seven galaxies and confidently confirm that they are bound together in a protocluster,” said Takahiro Morishita of IPAC-California Institute of Technology, the lead author of the study published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters. Based on the data collected, astronomers calculated the nascent cluster’s future development, finding that it will likely grow in size and mass to resemble the Coma Cluster, a monster of the modern universe. For the first time, a protocluster of seven galaxies has been confirmed at a distance that astronomers refer to as redshift 7.9, or a mere 650 million years after the big bang. NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has begun to shed light on formative years in the history of the universe that have thus far been beyond reach: the formation and assembly of galaxies. Every giant was once a baby, though you may never have seen them at that stage of their development.
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