Photo: NASA
Scientists have discovered a mysterious object with the James Webb telescope that could be a galaxy formed just 100 million years after the Big Bang, potentially making it the oldest known galaxy in the universe, reports Live Science.
The object, nicknamed “Capotauro,” could also be a brown dwarf or a “failed star”—objects more massive than the largest gas giants but not large enough to ignite nuclear fusion in their cores. Some brown dwarfs may have surface temperatures as low as 27°C near the Milky Way.
Researchers have not yet been able to definitively identify Capotauro. The study is posted on a preprint server and has not undergone peer review.
“Whatever Capotauro is, it seems truly interesting and promising,” said co-author Giovanni Gandolfi, an astrophysicist at Italy’s National Institute for Astrophysics.
Gandolfi and his team initially detected Capotauro while searching for very old galaxies in James Webb data, but early observations were too limited for identification. New data in March provided clearer signals, allowing them to narrow down possibilities.
The team used images from James Webb’s Near Infrared Camera (NIRCam) at seven wavelengths as part of the Cosmic Evolution Early Release Science (CEERS) study, detecting the object only at the two longest wavelengths. Further detailed data from the Near Infrared Spectrograph (NIRSpec) helped refine estimates of its age and temperature.
Combining these data, researchers modeled three galaxy configurations as well as the possibility that Capotauro is a brown dwarf. Results were inconclusive, leaving two most likely explanations for the object.
