Shulou(Shulou.com)12/24 Report--

CTOnews.com, Nov. 26 (Xinhua)-- using data from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), astronomers have discovered a huge chain of at least 20 galaxies, which they call the "cosmic vine."

The study was published in the arXiv preprint on November 8 (CTOnews.com with DOI:2311.04867).

According to reports, this "cosmic vine" spread in space in a bow, with a length of more than 1300 light-years and a width of about 650,000 light-years. By contrast, our Milky way is about 100,000 light-years across.

It is located in an area called the extended Gross Belt between Ursa Major and Auriga and is made up of gas and galactic beams.

In fact, the team is mainly looking for light from a very early universe, focusing on a property called redshift (a measure of the increase in wavelength of light as it travels to distant distances through the expanding universe).

It is said that all the galaxies observed in the "cosmic vine" show a redshift of about 3.44, which means that the light emitted by these objects traveled for about 11 to 12 billion years before reaching JWST, while the universe we now know is about 13.8 billion years old.

The team said the "cosmic vine" was "much larger" than other clusters of galaxies observed in other early cosmic history. According to the researchers, it seems to be evolving into a galaxy cluster (its mass usually ranges from tens of billions to hundreds of billions of times the mass of the sun).

Currently, the Cosmic Vine has an estimated mass of 260 billion solar masses and is still growing-but its two largest galaxies may be ready to stop growing. When the researchers studied the wavelengths of light emitted by the two galaxies, they found that the stars there had almost completely stopped evolving, so they were classified as "stationary" or "extinguished" galaxies.

Like many other recent JWST discoveries, the Cosmic Vine raises more questions about the nature of our universe, and further research is needed to figure out the mystery behind this ancient galaxy chain.

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