WLM is a dwarf galaxy in our neighborhood galaxy. Despite being only about 3 million light-years from Earth, it is still very far away despite being close to the Milky Way.
We think WLM hasn’t interacted with other systems, so it’s fantastic for testing our theories of galaxy formation and evolution. Since many of the other nearby galaxies are entangled and intertwined with the Milky Way, it is more challenging to study them.
Another intriguing and important property of WLM is that the gas that makes up the object is identical to the gas that formed galaxies in the early cosmos. It’s not particularly enriched chemically. In other words, it lacks substances that are heavier than hydrogen and helium.
What Are Galactic Winds?
This is because the galaxy lost many of these components as a result of a phenomena called galactic winds. A portion of the material is expelled from the galaxy as the massive stars explode, even though WLM has recently, in fact, throughout all of cosmic time—been creating stars and those stars have been synthesising new elements. Strong and intense enough supernovae can force material out of small, low-mass galaxies like WLM.
This makes WLM very interesting because you can use it to study how stars grow and develop in tiny galaxies like those in the early cosmos.
What’s It Like Watching These Stars?
It truly is fantastic. It’s like standing in the dark and looking up at the Milky Way in our own night sky when you see this on the dome.
Along with interesting nebular gas clouds within the galaxy, foreground stars with Webb’s diffraction spikes, and background galaxies with peculiar features like tidal tails, the image shows a large number of stars of diverse forms, ages, temperatures, and stages of evolution. It’s a fairly lovely image.
We cannot see the whole extent of the view with our eyes. Even if you were standing on a planet in the center of this galaxy and had infrared vision, you would need bionic eyes to see what Webb sees.
What Does WLM Hope To Achieve?
The main objective of science is to reconstruct the history of star formation in the galaxy. Some of the stars in WLM that are currently visible were generated in the early universe since low-mass stars can endure for billions of years.
Knowing more about these low-mass stars’ features, like their ages, may help us understand what was going on in the terribly distant past.
We can learn a lot about the early creation of galaxies by analysing high-redshift systems, where we can see galaxies as they were when they first formed.
The Early Release Science programmes were designed to highlight Webb’s capabilities and help astronomers prepare for upcoming observations.
What Benefits Does This Work Have for Other Astronomers?
The calibration of the NIRCam equipment is being investigated. The models of star evolution are being examined. Researchers are also developing software to gauge star brightness.
Hubble has already been utilised to carry out in-depth research on this subject. Researchers are using WLM as a kind of baseline for comparison (much like you’d use it in a lab) to understand the Webb data now that they are using it to investigate near-infrared light.
When measuring the brightness of the stars, researchers must be incredibly precise and accurate.
Conclusion
The development of a free software tool to estimate the brightness of each resolved star in the NIRCam images is another task for the researchers.
This open-source technology will be accessible to everyone. The measuring parameters are being refined, and the software is now being created and tested.
This will develop into a key tool for astronomers everywhere. If you want to do anything with resolved stars that are grouped together in the sky, you need a tool like this.