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NASA Webb Finds Early-Universe Analog’s Unexpected Talent for Making Dust

A region of space is filled with stars and clumps of glowing orange and tan dust. A small portion of the sky at the center of the image is outlined with a white box. Lines extend from the corner of the box to the inset panel at the top right showing a magnified version of the outlined portion of the image. In the inset, there are smatterings of dim whitish-blueish stars and about seven glowing red orbs across the center in a line. Also across the center of the inset is a green glow. The background of the image is filled with stars and galaxies of various shapes and colors.

Images from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope of the dwarf galaxy Sextans A reveal polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), large carbon-based molecules that can be a signifier of star formation. The inset at the top right zooms in on those PAHs, which are represented in green.

Credits:
Image: NASA, ESA, CSA, Elizabeth Tarantino (STScI), Martha Boyer (STScI), Julia Roman-Duval (STScI); Image Processing: Alyssa Pagan (STScI)

Using NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, astronomers have spotted two rare kinds of dust in the dwarf galaxy Sextans A, one of the most chemically primitive galaxies near the Milky Way. The finding of metallic iron dust and silicon carbide (SiC) produced by aging stars, along with tiny clumps of carbon-based molecules, shows that even when the universe had only a fraction of today’s heavy elements, stars and the interstellar medium could still forge solid dust grains. This research with Webb is reshaping ideas about how early galaxies evolved and developed the building blocks for planets, as NASA explores the secrets of the universe and our place in it.

Sextans A lies about 4 million light-years away and contains only 3 to 7 percent of the Sun’s metal content, or metallicity, the astrophysical term for elements heavier than hydrogen and helium. Because the galaxy is so small, unlike other nearby galaxies, its gravitational pull is too weak to retain the heavy elements like iron and oxygen created by supernovae and aging stars.

Galaxies like it resemble those that filled the early universe just after the big bang, when the universe was made of mostly hydrogen and helium, before stars had time to enrich space with ‘metals.’ Because it is relatively close, Sextans A gives astronomers a rare chance to study individual stars and interstellar clouds under conditions similar to those shortly after the big bang.

“Sextans A is giving us a blueprint for the first dusty galaxies,” said Elizabeth Tarantino, postdoctoral researcher at the Space Telescope Science Institute and lead author of the results in one of the two studies presented at a press conference at the 247th meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Phoenix. “These results help us interpret the most distant galaxies imaged by Webb and understand what the universe was building with its earliest ingredients.”

Image A: Sextans A PAHs Pull-out (NIRCam and MIRI Image)

Image: NASA, ESA, CSA, Elizabeth Tarantino (STScI), Martha Boyer (STScI), Julia Roman-Duval (STScI); Image Processing: Alyssa Pagan (STScI)

Forging dust without usual ingredients

One of those studies, published in the Astrophysical Journal, honed in on a half a dozen stars with the low-resolution spectrometer aboard Webb’s MIRI (Mid-Infrared Instrument). The data collected shows the chemical fingerprints of the bloated stars very late in their evolution, called asymptotic giant branch (AGB) stars. Stars with masses between one and eight times that of the Sun pass through this phase.

“One of these stars is on the high-mass end of the AGB range, and stars like this usually produce silicate dust. However, at such low metallicity, we expect these stars to be nearly dust-free,” said Martha Boyer, associate astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute and lead author in that second companion study. “Instead, Webb revealed a star forging dust grains made almost entirely of iron. This is something we’ve never seen in stars that are analogs of stars in the early universe.”

Silicates, the usual dust formed by oxygen-rich stars, require elements like silicon and magnesium that are almost nonexistent in Sextans A. It would be like trying to bake cookies in a kitchen without flour, sugar, and butter.

A normal cosmic kitchen, like the Milky Way, has those crucial ingredients in the form of silicon, carbon, and iron. In a primitive kitchen, like Sextans A, where almost all of those ingredients are missing, you barely have any proverbial flour or sugar. Therefore, astronomers expected that without those key ingredients, stars in Sextans A couldn’t “bake” much dust at all.

However, not only did they find dust, but Webb showed that one of these stars used an entirely different recipe than usual to make that dust.

The iron-only dust, as well as silicon carbide produced by the less massive AGB stars despite the galaxy’s low silicon abundance, proves that evolved stars can still build solid material even when the typical ingredients are missing.

“Dust in the early universe may have looked very different from the silicate grains we see today,” Boyer said. “These iron grains absorb light efficiently but leave no sharp spectral fingerprints and can contribute to the large dust reservoirs seen in far-away galaxies detected by Webb.”

Image B: Sextans A Context Image (Webb and KPNO)

Two panels showing different views of a small galaxy. The left panel, labeled Webb, shows a region of space filled with stars and small clumps of glowing orange and tan dust. The right panel is labeled KPNO. This image shows stars on the black background of space, with a higher concentration of them in a globe at the center. On the edges of this circular globe, there are puffs of pink gas. A small portion of the of the galaxy in the right panel is outlined with a white box, and the image from the left panel appears in that box at a 45-degree angle. Lines extend from the corner of the box to the panel at the left.

NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope’s image of a portion of the nearby Sextans A galaxy is put into context using a ground-based image from the Nicholas U. Mayall 4-meter Telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory.

Image: STScI, NASA, ESA, CSA, KPNO, NSF’s NOIRLab, AURA, Elizabeth Tarantino (STScI), Phil Massey (Lowell Obs.), George Jacoby (NSF, AURA), Chris Smith (NSF, AURA); Image Processing: Alyssa Pagan (STScI), Travis Rector (UAA), Mahdi Zamani (NSF’s NOIRLab), Davide De Martin (NSF’s NOIRLab)

Tiny clumps of organic molecules

In the companion study, currently under peer review, Webb imaged Sextans A’s interstellar medium and discovered polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), which are complex, carbon-based molecules and the smallest dust grains that glow in infrared light. The discovery means Sextans A is now the lowest-metallicity galaxy ever found to contain PAHs.

But, unlike the broad, sweeping PAH emission seen in metal-rich galaxies, Webb revealed PAHs in tiny, dense pockets only a few light-years across.

“Webb shows that PAHs can form and survive even in the most metal-starved galaxies, but only in small, protected islands of dense gas,” said Tarantino.

The clumps likely represent regions where dust shielding and gas density reach just high enough to allow PAHs to form and grow, solving a decades-long mystery about why PAHs seem to vanish in metal-poor galaxies.

The team has an approved Webb Cycle 4 program to use high-resolution spectroscopy to study the detailed chemistry of Sextans A’s PAH clumps further.

Image C: Giant Star in Dwarf Galaxy Sextans A (Spectrum)

Graphic titled “Giant Star in Dwarf Galaxy Sextans A: Iron-Rich Dust at Low Metallicities” showing a graph of brightness versus wavelength, with two sets of data and two model spectra. One set of data is represented in 12 orange triangle data points, and the other is a solid yellow line. A cyan solid line represents “Iron + 0.8% silicates” and a red dashed line represents “Iron + 5% silicates.” They appear on a graph of Brightness on the y-axis versus Wavelength of Light in microns on x-axis. The y-axis ranges from dimmer at bottom to brighter at top. The x-axis ranges from 0 to 12 microns.

This graph shows a spectrum of an Asymptotic Giant Branch (AGB) star in the Sextans A galaxy. It compares data collected by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope with models of mostly silicate-free dust and dust containing at least 5% silicates.

Illustration: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Joseph Olmsted (STScI)

Connecting two discoveries

Together, the results show that the early universe had more diverse dust production pathways than the more established and proven methods, like supernova explosions. Additionally, researchers now know there’s more dust than predicted at extremely low metallicities.

“Every discovery in Sextans A reminds us that the early universe was more inventive than we imagined,” said Boyer. “Clearly stars found a way to make the building blocks of planets long before galaxies like our own existed.”

The James Webb Space Telescope is the world’s premier space science observatory. Webb is solving mysteries in our solar system, looking beyond to distant worlds around other stars, and probing the mysterious structures and origins of our universe and our place in it. Webb is an international program led by NASA with its partners, ESA (European Space Agency) and CSA (Canadian Space Agency).

To learn more about Webb, visit:

https://science.nasa.gov/webb

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Related Images & Videos

Sextans A PAHs Pull-out (NIRCam and MIRI Image)

Sextans A Context Image (Webb and KPNO)

Image titled u201cJames Webb Space Telescope; Sextans A, UGCA 205,u201d with compass arrows, scale bar, and color key. At the left, a region of space is filled with stars and clumps of glowing orange and tan dust. A small portion of the sky at the center of the image is outlined with a white box. In the inset, there are smatterings of dim whitish-blueish stars and about seven glowing red orbs across the center in a line. Also across center of the image is a green glow. At the bottom left are compass arrows indicating the orientation of the image on the sky. The east arrow points toward 2 ou2019clock. The north arrow points in the 10 ou2019clock direction. At the bottom left is a scale bar labeled 300 light-years, 15 arcsec. The length of the scale bar is about one tenth of the total image. Below the image is a color key showing which NIRCam and MIRI filters were used to create the image and which visible-light color is assigned to each filter.

Sextans A PAHs Pull-out (Compass Image)

This image of dwarf galaxy Sextans A, captured by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope’s Near Infrared Camera (NIRCam) and Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI), shows compass arrows, scale bar, and color key for reference.