While analyzing some of the data from one of the first images of a well-known early galaxy which was taken by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope(JWST), astronomers from the Cornell university at Ithaca discovered a new companion galaxy which was previously hidden behind the light of one of the foreground galaxies - one that surprisingly seems to have already hosted hundreds of generations of stars despite its very young age which is estimated to be 1.4 billion years old.
Earlier images which were captured by the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array in Chile contain quite a few hints of the companion galaxy which was resolved clearly by JWST , but could not be interpreted as anything more than a random, unknown noise.
The team estimated that the companion galaxy was within 16,307 light years of another galaxy which was one of the brightest and largest star-forming galaxies in the early universe, its distant light bent and magnified many times by the foreground galaxy’s gravity into a circle known as the Einstein Ring.
What is the most surprising about the companion galaxy, taking into consideration its age and mass, was its mature metallicity - the amount of elements which were heavier than hydrogen and helium, such as aluminum, gold, etc. “We are seeing the leftovers of at least a couple of generations of stars which have lived and died within the first billion years of the entire universe’s existence. This is not what we typically see,” said Amit Vishwas, a research associate at the Cornell Center for Astrophysics and planetary sciences(CCAPS)
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