The James Webb Space Telescope makes it possible to discover many celestial objects that we would not have been able to before, including those that could improve our knowledge of how our universe began. A team of astronomers, for example, has discovered a “rich population of black dwarfs” outside our galaxy for the first time. The image above was captured using the telescope’s Near-InfraRed Camera (NIRCam) instrument.
We already know about nearly 3,000 brown dwarfs within the Milky Way, but Webb made it possible to find candidates 200,000 light years away from our planet. “Only with incredible sensitivity and spatial resolution in the right wavelength regime is it possible to detect these objects at such great distances,” said Peter Zeidler, leader of the European Space Agency’s AURA/STScI team. “This has never happened before and will remain impossible from the start for the foreseeable future.”
Brown dwarfs are not planets or stars. They are free-floating objects 13 to 75 times more massive than Jupiter, and are not bound to the star like exoplanets. Yes, they are larger than the gas giants, but they are also not large enough to produce large amounts of light, which is why they are sometimes called “failed stars.” According to the scientists involved in the study, what they observed supports the theory that brown dwarfs form like stars, they just “don’t grow enough mass to become a full-fledged star.” As NASA notes, scientists think it’s possible that the “bulk” of the universe’s mass comes in the form of brown dwarfs. Given that they are very dark and cannot produce light, they may help answer the “missing mass” problem that astronomers are still trying to solve.
The team discovered new brown candidates in a galaxy called NGC 602 near the outskirts of the Small Magellanic Cloud galaxy. They explained that earlier Hubble observations showed that the cluster contained very small stars, but Webb made it possible to look at them up close. Based on their observations, this cluster exists in an environment similar to the early universe, which means that studying brown dwarfs may provide additional clues to how stars and planets formed billions of years ago.
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