![]() ![]() Pandya also says their work wouldn’t be possible without the extensive research astronomers have done using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope.įor decades, Hubble has wowed us with images of some of the earliest galaxies, beginning with its first “deep field” in 1995 and continuing with a seminal survey known as Cosmic Assembly Near-infrared Deep Extragalactic Legacy Survey. Webb’s sensitivity, high-resolution images, and specialization in infrared light allowed the team to make quick work of characterizing many CEERS galaxies, and model their 3D geometries. We can now study how galaxies’ shapes relate to how they look and better project how they formed in much more detail.” ![]() “Identifying additional categories for early galaxies is exciting – there’s a lot more to analyze now. “In the early universe, galaxies had had far less time to grow,” said Kartheik Iyer, a co-author and NASA Hubble Fellow also at Columbia University. These distant galaxies are also far less massive than nearby spirals and ellipticals – they are precursors to more massive galaxies like our own. Image: 3D Classifications for Distant Galaxies This hypothesis is based partly on new evidence from Webb – theorists have “wound back the clock” to estimate the Milky Way’s mass billions of years ago, which correlates with shape at that time. Which category would our Milky Way galaxy fall into if we were able to wind the clock back by billions of years? “Our best guess is that it might have appeared more like a surfboard,” said co-author Haowen Zhang, a PhD candidate at the University of Arizona in Tucson. The frisbees were found to be as large as the surfboard- and pool noodle-shaped galaxies along the “horizon,” but become more common closer to “shore” in the nearby universe. The “volleyballs,” or sphere-shaped galaxies, appear the most compact type on the cosmic “ocean” and were also the least frequently identified. ![]() While most distant galaxies look like surfboards and pool noodles, others are shaped like frisbees and volleyballs. NASA, ESA, CSA, Steve Finkelstein (UT Austin), Micaela Bagley (UT Austin), Rebecca Larson (UT Austin) ![]()
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