Head-scratching observations of distant galaxies are challenging cosmologists’ dominant ideas about the universe, potentially leading to the implication that the strange substance called dark matter doesn’t exist.

That’s one possible conclusion from a new study published June 20 in The Astrophysical Journal Letters. The finding “raises questions of an extraordinarily fundamental nature,” says Richard Brent Tully, an astronomer at the University of Hawaii at Manoa who was not involved in the work.

Astronomers suspect dark matter exists because of the way stars and other visible material at a galaxy’s visible edge rotate. The rotation speeds of objects far from a galactic center are much higher than they should be given the amount of luminous stuff seen in telescopes. Under physicists’ current understanding of gravity, this implies that a massive reservoir of invisible matter must be tugging on those stars. More

Galaxies that helped transform the early universe may have been small, round and green.

Astronomers using the James Webb Space Telescope have spotted “Green Pea” galaxies dating to 13.1 billion years ago. These viridescent runts, spotted just 700 million years after the Big Bang, might have helped trigger one of the greatest makeovers in cosmic history, astronomers said at a January 9 news conference in Seattle at the American Astronomical Society’s annual meeting.

Green Peas first showed up in 2009 in images from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, an ambitious project to map much of the sky. Citizen science volunteers gave the objects their colorful name. Their greenish hue is because most of their light comes from glowing gas clouds, rather than directly from stars.

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These galaxies are rare in the present-day universe. Astronomers think that the ones that do exist are analogs of galaxies that were more plentiful in the early universe.

“They’re a bit like living fossils,” said astrophysicist James Rhoads of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. “Coelacanths, if you will,” referencing a fish thought to be extinct until it showed up off the coast of South Africa in 1938 (SN: 12/2/11). 

These galaxies leak much more ultraviolet light, which can rip electrons from atoms, than typical galaxies do. So Green Peas dating to the universe’s first billion years or so could be partly responsible for a dramatic and mysterious cosmic transition called reionization, when most of the hydrogen atoms in the early universe had their electrons torn away (SN: 1/7/20).

Three ancient Green Peas turned up in JWST’s first image, released in July 2022 (SN: 7/21/22). The objects look red in JWST’s infrared vision, but the wavelengths of light they emit are like those of the previously discovered Green Peas. The findings were also published in the Jan. 1 Astrophysical Journal Letters.

“This helps us explain how the universe reionized,” Rhoads said. “I think this is an important piece of the puzzle.” More

PASADENA, Calif. — The faint dwarf galaxies in a nearby galaxy group seem to have missed the memo. Instead of being dispersed evenly around the group’s most massive galaxy, which is what happens in our own galaxy group, these newly found dwarfs cluster in one region. And astronomers don’t know why.

“This satellite distribution is just weird,” astronomer Eric Bell said June 13 at the American Astronomical Society meeting.

Bell, of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, and colleagues used the Subaru telescope in Hawaii to hunt for faint clumps of stars, indicating dwarf galaxies, around the galaxy M81. This Milky Way–like galaxy is the most prominent member in a relatively nearby group of galaxies, all about 12 million light-years from Earth. The team found one definite dwarf galaxy and six possible fainter ones.

Most of the known satellite galaxies (circled in red) in the M81 galaxy group, along with seven newfound candidates (yellow), seem to cluster toward one side of the galaxy M81 (center).Sloan Digital Sky Survey

“The part that’s just bananas,” Bell said, is that the newfound satellite galaxies all sit on one side of M81.

Computer simulations of galaxy evolution suggest that the largest galaxies have many faint, small galaxies sprinkled uniformly throughout the outer part of the dominant galaxy’s diffuse cloudlike halo. Observations in our galaxy group back this up: The dozens of dwarf galaxies known to orbit in the Milky Way’s outskirts are distributed evenly around the galaxy, as are most of the dwarf galaxies seen around our nearest large neighbor, the Andromeda Galaxy (SN: 3/11/15; SN: 8/19/15).

But in the M81 group, the seven newly identified star clumps appear to surround a smaller member of that group, NGC 3077, which is about one-tenth the mass of M81. “The fact that the bigger thing doesn’t have more satellites,” Bell says, “nobody expects that.” More

The burst of light from far away may have been a new type of supernova GLOBAL OBSERVATIONS  An odd stellar flare called the “Cow” was observed by telescopes around the world, including the Australia Telescope Compact Array (shown) near Narrabri, Australia. Alex Cherney, CSIRO Share this: This article is only available to Science News subscribers. […] More

Rocky planets might have been forming since the beginning of the universe. A stellar nursery in a neighboring galaxy has the right materials for such planet formation, researchers report April 24 in Nature Astronomy.

The overall chemical makeup of the tiny galaxy, called the Small Magellanic Cloud, is akin to that of the early universe. The finding suggests that rocky planets might have been able to develop in the relatively pristine chemical environment that pervaded the cosmos just a couple billion years after the Big Bang.

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The Small Magellanic Cloud is one of the Milky Way’s nearest galactic neighbors, though it’s very different from our galaxy. The tiny galaxy has a much lower abundance of heavy metal elements — such as iron, magnesium and aluminum — which are all crucial to the formation of rocky planets. This low-metal environment also mimics that of the early universe, an epoch before stars had enough time to forge the heavy elements and blow them out into space.

Because of the lack of these elements, astronomers have been unsure if rocky planets are able to form in the Small Magellanic Cloud. And previous telescopes did not have the ability to really probe young stars with a mass less than or equal to that of the sun, so astronomers couldn’t measure the star systems’ dust content, which is needed to infer if planets could be being born. But with the sensitivity of the James Webb Space Telescope, or JWST, astronomers can now gather more light and see smaller, fainter stars in greater detail (SN: 12/7/22).

Astrophysicist Olivia Jones and colleagues used an infrared camera on JWST to look at a region of the Small Magellanic Cloud called NGC 346, where young stars are forming. “It’s the first time ever we’ve really been able to look at how solar-size stars form in an environment akin to the early universe,” says Jones, of the Royal Observatory, Edinburgh.

The team detected signatures that suggest that lots of dust is orbiting and falling toward hundreds of stars in the region. As these dust grains orbit, they could begin to stick together and eventually accrete to create rocky planets.

“One of the things we would love to understand better is how the environmental context impacts star formation and then, later on, the planet-forming populations around those young, forming stars,” says Michael Meyer, an astronomer at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor who was not involved in the research.

Because the Small Magellanic Cloud is the nearest example of a cosmic region with a much different chemical composition than the Milky Way, he says, it provides the first touchstone to study how star and planet formation depend on the stellar environment.

The low-metal stellar environment in the Small Magellanic Cloud is comparable to that of faraway galaxies that were developing around 11 billion years ago. During this time, a period called “cosmic noon,” there was a surge of star formation throughout the cosmos. If rocky planets could be accreting around stars in the Small Magellanic Cloud, the researchers suggest, such worlds could have been forming in the early years of the universe as well.

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The young stars in NGC 346 are also relative lightweights. One reason scientists are interested in studying the possibility of planet formation around low-mass stars is because they are the most common type of stars in the universe and the longest-lived, says Penn State astronomer Kevin Luhman, who was not involved in the research.

“They offer the longest period of time in which life might form and survive on any planets around them,” Luhman says. “If the most common star in the universe lived for only a million years, then exploded, that would be kind of bad for life.” The fact that these types of stars can potentially form rocky planets, he says, is a good sign for life developing elsewhere in the universe.

Follow-up research will focus on determining what chemical signatures can be found developing around the stars, Jones says. This could clue the researchers in to what the chemical elements are that make up any rocky planets. More