A star bar is found in a galaxy where the Universe was very young

2025/05/22 Etxebeste Aduriz, Egoitz - Elhuyar Zientzia Iturria: Elhuyar aldizkaria

• Astrofisika
• Astronomia

An early galaxy has been found to have a star bar with observations made with the ALMA and JWST telescopes. Star bars are common in the center of large galaxies. But they are very complex structures, so it was thought that they could only exist in more evolved galaxies. Moreover, with the properties of early galaxies, it was considered almost impossible to have a stable bar.

The bar has been found in the massive galaxy J0107. This galaxy dates back to 2.6 billion years of age and has a star generation rate 300 times higher than that of the Milky Way. These early stellar clusters were heretofore thought to be formed by violent collisions or fusions, but this observation suggests that the rod appears to direct gas toward the center and thereby cause stellar formation without collisions. In fact, it has been observed that in the galaxy J0107 there is a gas flow of 20,000 light-years radius towards the center, which causes the formation of so many stars.

Although it has been made in a single galaxy, this observation suggests that the evolution of galaxies through bars was already taking place 11 billion years ago. The study was published in the journal Nature.