The Secrets of the Universe | Webb Spots Milky Way's Twin! @TheSecretsoftheUniverse | Uploaded March 2023 | Updated October 2024, 4 days ago.
The James Webb Space Telescope has found the Milky Way’s long-lost twin. It’s a galaxy that lies 9 billion light-years away in the constellation Volans. Since it has dozens of glittering globular clusters orbiting it, it has been named ‘The Sparkler.’ The galaxy lies so far away that we are actually looking at how it appeared 9 billion years ago when it was about 4 billion years old. Our current observations show it has only about 3% of the mass of the Milky Way.
Webb turned out to be so powerful that it even spotted individual star clusters in distant galaxies. ‘The Sparkler’s clusters have been found to have striking similarities with the Milky Way’s globular clusters. This means if it follows a similar growth path to our galaxy through a series of galaxy mergers, eventually, it would match the Milky Way’s mass in the present-day universe, looking like its twin.
#astronomy #space #jameswebbspacetelescope #space
The James Webb Space Telescope has found the Milky Way’s long-lost twin. It’s a galaxy that lies 9 billion light-years away in the constellation Volans. Since it has dozens of glittering globular clusters orbiting it, it has been named ‘The Sparkler.’ The galaxy lies so far away that we are actually looking at how it appeared 9 billion years ago when it was about 4 billion years old. Our current observations show it has only about 3% of the mass of the Milky Way.
Webb turned out to be so powerful that it even spotted individual star clusters in distant galaxies. ‘The Sparkler’s clusters have been found to have striking similarities with the Milky Way’s globular clusters. This means if it follows a similar growth path to our galaxy through a series of galaxy mergers, eventually, it would match the Milky Way’s mass in the present-day universe, looking like its twin.
#astronomy #space #jameswebbspacetelescope #space
