Newswise — The cosmos is full of questions.
Still, astronomers using NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope — including Wellesley assistant professor Lamiya Mowla ’13 — were surprised to find a distant, red galaxy distorted into the shape of a question mark.
Their discovery—led by Vince Estrada-Carpenter, a postdoctoral fellow at St. Mary’s University in Halifax, Nova Scotia—was published today on the NASA web site. Photos show that a specific, rarely-seen type of natural gravitational lens is causing the galaxy to appear multiple times.
The lensing also magnifies the galaxy and its spiral companion, allowing astronomers to pinpoint specific regions of star formation, using a combination of infrared data from Webb and ultraviolet data from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope.
Mowla—an observational astronomer who uses the James Webb Space Telescope and cosmological simulations to study the formation and evolution of galaxies since the cosmic dawn—says the discovery is visually thrilling and may provide clues about how, when, and where stars form in a galaxy such as our own Milky Way.
“This galaxy pair is a gorgeous demonstration of the funhouse mirror effect that spacetime can have when it is warped by a gigantic mass such as a galaxy cluster,” Mowla says. “We can see five images of this galaxy pair, arranged like a question mark on the sky, even though only one pair exists in reality.”
Mowla is collaborating with several teams of researchers who are continuing to study this and other images from Hubble and JWST. More than half a dozen Wellesley students are supporting the effort with work in Mowla’s lab.
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