Data from the telescope also questioned the role of merging galaxies in the processes of their evolution.
The successor to the iconic Hubble telescope, the James Webb Space Telescope has seen its first supernova – the explosion of a dying star.
The James Webb camera spotted an unexpectedly bright object in the galaxy SDSS.J141930.11+5251593, about 3-4 billion light-years from Earth. After five days, it faded, which could indicate that it was a supernova, caught by accident after the star exploded.
Astronomers compared the new observations with archived Hubble data to confirm that the explosion had already occurred during the observation period.
Look at the beginning of the universe. Webb will replace Hubble
Space Telescope Science Institute
Note that James Webb was not designed to search for supernovae. This task is usually done by large telescopes that scan the sky at short intervals.
A work was also published based on data from James Webb, which showed that the role of merging galaxies in the processes of their evolution was exaggerated.
From James Web’s observations, disk galaxies are very common at z∼3-6, where they make up 50 percent of the galaxy’s population, more than ten times more than previous estimates based on Hubble data. This could mean that the morphology of some disk galaxies, such as the Milky Way, has remained in its current form for over ten billion years.
arXiv
Such a conclusion calls into question the notion that galaxy mergers are a common process, and it may turn out that merger events are the dominant process for the formation of stellar mass only in some types of galaxies, such as spheroidals. .
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