View Quasar J0100+2802 and over 20,000 Galaxies | James Webb Space Telescope

View Quasar J0100+2802 and over 20,000 Galaxies | James Webb Space Telescope

More than 20,000 tiny galaxies appear across the black background of space in this new James Webb Space Telescope image. At the center is a pink object with six diffraction spikes. This is quasar J0100+2802. A quasar is an extremely luminous active supermassive black hole that acts like an enormous flashlight. This one appears slightly smaller than the blue foreground stars. The galaxy colors here vary. Some of the smallest galaxies are shades of orange and pink. Most galaxies are so distant they appear as single points of light. Slightly larger, fuzzier galaxies appear whiter. Some have distinct spiral arms. In front of the galaxies are several foreground stars, though none appear larger than the largest galaxies. The foreground stars are scattered around the image, appear blue and have eight prominent diffraction spikes. 

The Webb Telescope team analyzed 117 galaxies that all existed approximately 900 million years after the big bang—focusing on 59 that lie in front of the quasar. The researchers could study not only the galaxies themselves, but also the illuminated gas surrounding them.   

These galaxies existed just before the end of the Era of Reionization, when the universe contained a patchwork of gas—some opaque and some transparent (or ionized). “As we look back into the teeth of reionization, we see a very distinct change,” explained Simon Lilly of ETH Zürich in Switzerland, who leads this team of researchers. “Galaxies, which are made up of billions of stars, are ionizing the gas around them, effectively transforming it into transparent gas.”

Researchers have long sought evidence to explain what happened during this period, when the universe experienced dramatic changes. After the big bang, gas in the universe was incredibly hot and dense. Over hundreds of millions of years, the gas cooled. Then, the universe hit “repeat.” The gas again became hot and ionized—and transparent.

The team’s results more concretely define the conditions at this specific “stop” in the universe’s history. “Not only does Webb clearly show that these transparent regions exist around galaxies, we’ve also measured how large they are,” explained Daichi Kashino of Nagoya University in Japan and the lead author of the team’s first paper. Think of the transparent regions of gas like hot air balloons, with galaxies the size of peas clearing that space.

Webb showed that galaxies have fully ionized the gas within a 2 million light-year radius. That’s approximately the same distance as the space between our Milky Way galaxy and our nearest neighbor, Andromeda. Over the next hundred million years, the bubbles went on to grow larger and larger, eventually merging and causing the entire universe to become transparent.

Image Credits:

NASA, ESA, CSA, Simon Lilly (ETH Zurich), Daichi Kashino (Nagoya University), Jorryt Matthee (ETH Zurich), Christina Eilers (MIT), Rob Simcoe (MIT), Rongmon Bordoloi (NCSU), Ruari Mackenzie (ETH Zurich)

Image Processing: Alyssa Pagan (STScI), Ruari Mackenzie (ETH Zurich)

Release Date: June 12, 2023

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