The red quasar the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope observed, called SDSS J165202.64+172852.3 (SDSSJ1652 for short), resides in a very dense environment with several interacting companion galaxies.
These images show the extremely red quasar SDSS J165202.64+172852.3 and its environment. Image credit: NASA / ESA / CSA / Webb / D. Wylezalek, A. Vayner & Q3D Team / N. Zakamska.
SDSSJ1652 is so far away that its light has taken around 11.5 billion years to reach our planet.
The quasar is unusually red not just because of its intrinsic red color, but also because its light has been redshifted by its vast distance.
That made Webb, having unparalleled sensitivity in infrared wavelengths, perfectly suited to examine the object in detail.
SDSSJ1652 is one of the most powerful known galactic nuclei that’s been seen at such an extreme distance.
“We think something dramatic is about to happen in these systems,” said Dr. Andrey Vayner, an astronomer at Johns Hopkins University.
“The galaxy is at this perfect moment in its lifetime, about to transform and look entirely different in a few billion years.”
To investigate the movement of the gas, dust and stellar material in SDSSJ1652, Dr. Vayner and colleagues used Webb’s Near Infrared Spectrograph (NIRSpec).
Previous studies by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope and other observatories called attention to the quasar’s powerful outflows, and astronomers had speculated that its host galaxy could be merging with some unseen partner.
But the study authors were not expecting Webb’s NIRSpec data to clearly indicate it was not just one galaxy, but at least three more swirling around it.
Thanks to spectra over a broad area, the motions of all this surrounding material could be mapped, resulting in the conclusion that the red quasar was in fact part of a dense knot of galaxy formation.
“There are few galaxy protoclusters known at this early time. It’s hard to find them, and very few have had time to form since the Big Bang,” said Dr. Dominika Wylezalek, an astronomer at Heidelberg University.
“This may eventually help us understand how galaxies in dense environments evolve. It’s an exciting result.”
Using the observations from NIRSpec, the astronomers were able to confirm three galactic companions to this quasar and show how they are connected. Archival Hubble data from hint that there may be even more.
The researchers suspect they could have been looking at the core of a whole cluster of galaxies — only now revealed by Webb’s crisp imaging.
“It’s super exciting to be one of the first people to see this really cool object,” said Yuzo Ishikawa, a graduate student at Johns Hopkins University.
The three confirmed galaxies are orbiting each other at incredibly high speeds, an indication that a great deal of mass is present.
When combined with how closely they are packed into the region around this quasar, the team believes this marks one of the densest known areas of galaxy formation in the early Universe.
“Even a dense knot of dark matter isn’t sufficient to explain it. We think we could be seeing a region where two massive halos of dark matter are merging together,” Dr. Wylezalek said.
The team’s work will appear in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.
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Dominika Wylezalek et al. 2022. First results from the JWST Early Release Science Program Q3D: Turbulent times in the life of a z~3 extremely red quasar revealed by NIRSpec IFU. ApJL, in press; arXiv: 2210.10074
