The University of Massachusetts Amherst

Whitaker and her team discovered a galaxy 11 billion light years away known as “The Relic” in whose wake, or tidal tale, are scattered young globular clusters in the process of forming.
Research

Mystery in the Milky Way Partly Explained by ‘Globular Clusters’ at the Universe’s Edge

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Whitaker and her team discovered a galaxy 11 billion light years away known as “The Relic” (brightest disk upper right) in whose wake, or tidal tale, are scattered young globular clusters in the process of forming. The Relic has been removed from the image on the right to better see the clusters. The lower panel shows the same views, but with the clusters labeled.
Whitaker and her team discovered a galaxy 11 billion light years away known as “The Relic” (brightest disk upper right) in whose wake, or tidal tale, are scattered young globular clusters in the process of forming. The Relic has been removed from the image on the right to better see the clusters. The lower panel shows the same views, but with the clusters labeled.

How did our own galaxy, the Milky Way, form? Part of the answer to that question lies with poorly understood objects known as “globular clusters” – incredibly dense collections of stars that are nearly as old as the universe itself, and yet whose formation remains a mystery.

Katherine Whitaker, UMass Amherst professor of astronomy, has been working with data from the James Webb Space Telescope to peer, for the first time, at globular clusters 11 billion light-years away, which means she’s effectively looking 11 billion years into the past to see how and why these globular clusters formed.

Whitaker recently unveiled her findings and discussed how they help us piece together the history of galactic formation at a press conference hosted by the American Astronomical Society.

A recording of the press conference, which was livestreamed on the AAS’s YouTube channel, can be viewed below.