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Using data from both the James Webb and Hubble space telescopes, an international team of astronomers, including the University of Massachusetts Amherst’s Distinguished Professor Daniela Calzetti, have been able to, for the first time, glimpse one of the most mysterious parts of a star’s life: the moments just after birth, when the star is still wrapped in its “natal cloud.” This glimpse does more than shine a bright light on stars’ lifecycle; it also answers one of the thorniest questions from the early universe: how did the early universe manage to re-ionize itself after it cooled down from the Big Bang?

Research led by Daniel Ivanov, who earned his undergraduate degree at UMass Amherst studying under Professor of Astronomy Mauro Giavalisco and is now a physics and astronomy graduate student at the University of Pittsburgh, has uncovered a contender for one of the earliest observed spiral galaxies containing a stellar bar – a sometimes-striking visual feature that can play an important role in the evolution of a galaxy.

Giavalisco, as well as Yingjie Cheng, who received her doctorate in astronomy from UMass Amherst, and John Weaver, who completed a postdoc in UMass Amherst’s astronomy department, are all co-authors of the new research, which helps constrain the timeframe in which bars could have first emerged in the universe. Analysis of light from the galaxy, called COSMOS-74706, places it on the cosmic timeline at about 11.5 billion years ago.