The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) and NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory (Chandra) have teamed up to provide new images of an ancient, distant galaxy cluster in the midst of its early formation, just 1 billion years after the Big Bang. Scientists thought it was impossible to form galaxy clusters this long ago.

Webb, Chandra, and other state-of-the-art telescopes and observatories are encouraging astronomers to rethink when and how the universe’s largest structures came to exist.

The photographed object JADES-ID1 is located in the ongoing JWST Deep Extragalactic Exploration (JADES), 12.7 billion light-years from Earth. This means that the light in the images taken by JWST and Chandra has been traveling through space for 12.7 billion years, about 2.8 times as long as Earth has existed and more than 42,000 times as long as humans have existed.

Galaxy clusters have extremely large masses, about 20 trillion times that of the Sun. Although JADES-ID1 is technically classified as a “proto-star cluster” because it is observed during an early “intense” stage of formation, JADES-ID1 has been observed at much greater distances and earlier in the universe than astronomers thought.

“This may be the most distant protostar cluster ever identified,” says Akos Bogdan of the Center for Astrophysics. Harvard University and Smithsonian University (CfA). Bogdan led the research. “JADES-ID1 is giving us new evidence that the universe was growing rapidly.”

“We thought we would find proto-star clusters like this two or three billion years after the Big Bang, rather than one billion years,” added co-author Qiong Li from the University of Manchester in the UK. “Previously, astronomers had discovered surprisingly large galaxies and black holes shortly after the Big Bang, but now we know that galaxy clusters can also grow rapidly.”

Galaxy clusters are essential to scientists studying the history of the universe. These can be used to measure the expansion of the universe, along with the cosmic importance of dark energy and dark matter. Galaxy clusters typically contain hundreds or even thousands of individual galaxies within a pool of superheated gas, invisible dark matter, and energy. In the case of the JADES-ID1 proto-galaxy cluster, scientists have so far identified at least 66 potential galaxies.

“It’s really important to actually see how and when galaxy clusters grow. It’s like watching a car being built on an assembly line, rather than looking at the finished product and trying to understand how it works,” explains co-author Gerrit Shellenberger, who also works at CfA.

Most models of the universe indicate that galaxies are not dense enough for primordial galaxy clusters like JADES-ID1 to form just a billion years after the Big Bang. The previous record holder for such a protocluster emitting X-ray radiation was about 3 billion years after the Big Bang, or 2 billion years after JADES-ID1.

Unsurprisingly, given that JADES-ID1 is a record-breaking proto-star cluster that forced scientists to rethink their models of the universe, significant imaging power was required to discover it.

To find JADES-ID1 in the far reaches of space, astronomers combined deep observations from JWST and Chandra.

“To find JADES-ID1, astronomers combined deep observations from both Chandra and Webb. By design, the JADES field overlaps with the Chandra Deep Field South, the site of the deepest X-ray observations to date. Therefore, this field is one of the few in the entire sky where such discoveries can be made,” the Chandra team said. Explained in press release. “In previous work, Lee and Conselis and their team discovered five other protocluster candidates in the JADES region, but only JADES-ID1 has galaxies embedded in hot gas. Only JADES-ID1 has enough mass for an X-ray signal from hot gas to be expected.”

“Discoveries like this are made when two powerful telescopes, like Chandra and Webb, stare at the same part of the sky at the limits of their observational capabilities,” study co-author Christopher Conselis of the University of Manchester concluded. Now, Conselice and the rest of the team need to figure out how JADES-ID1 is even possible in the first place.

related research paper It was published last week in nature.

Image credits: Credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/CfA/Á Bogdán. JWST: NASA/ESA/CSA/STScI; Image processing: NASA/CXC/SAO/P. Edmonds and L. Frattare