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2h ago

JWST Spots Most Distant ‘Jellyfish’ Galaxy Candidate at Redshift 1.156

Gas tails with newborn star clumps point to ram-pressure stripping in a dense cluster environment.

This is the spiral galaxy ESO 137-001, the first Jellyfish Galaxy discovered. Ram pressure has stripped some of its gas and stretched into long filaments that dangle in one direction like jellyfish tentacles. Now astronomers have discovered another candidate jellyfish galaxy, but this one appears much earlier in the Universe, surprising astronomers. Image Credit: ESA/Hubble, CC BY 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=31544838
This Webb image shows the jellyfish galaxy COSMOS2020-635829; the dashed circles mark the four extraplanar sources that are identified in the tail of the galaxy. Image credit: Roberts et al., doi: 10.3847/1538-4357/ae3824.
Image

Overview

  • COSMOS2020-635829 was identified in the well-studied COSMOS field and is seen as it was about 8.5 billion years ago.
  • The galaxy shows a normal stellar disk plus a unilateral tail dotted with very young, blue star-forming knots.
  • Researchers interpret the morphology as ram-pressure stripping as the galaxy moves through a hot intracluster medium.
  • The object is reported in The Astrophysical Journal as a candidate and as the most distant jellyfish galaxy yet observed.
  • The team has requested additional JWST time, with complementary observations used to probe star-forming clumps within the tail.