James Webb telescope uncovers starving galaxy and cosmic surprises

Monday 12 January 2026 - 12:20

By: Dakir Madiha

James Webb telescope uncovers starving galaxy and cosmic surprises

The James Webb Space Telescope has unveiled groundbreaking observations of the early universe, spotlighting a massive galaxy starved by its own supermassive black hole, unusual cosmic dust in a primitive dwarf galaxy, and a puzzling new class of galaxies that defy standard classifications.

Researchers from the University of Cambridge have pinpointed one of the earliest known "dead" galaxies, dubbed GS-10578 or the "Pablo galaxy" after the astronomer who first studied it closely. This behemoth, boasting about 200 billion solar masses, formed most of its stars between 12.5 and 11.5 billion years ago, only to abruptly halt new star formation despite its youth in cosmic terms. Observations blending data from Webb and the Atacama Large Millimeter Array, published in Nature Astronomy on January 12, reveal a supermassive black hole methodically suffocating its host rather than unleashing destructive outbursts.

Webb's spectroscopy detected powerful outflows from the black hole racing at 400 kilometers per second, expelling the equivalent of 60 solar masses of gas annually. Unlike a sudden cataclysm, this process resembles "death by a thousand cuts," repeatedly heating incoming gas and depriving the galaxy of star-forming fuel. "The galaxy looks like a calm rotating disk," noted Dr. Francesco D'Eugenio, co-lead author from Cambridge's Kavli Institute for Cosmology. "This tells us it hasn't undergone a major disruptive merger with another galaxy."

In a separate finding shared at the 247th American Astronomical Society meeting in Phoenix, astronomers spotted rare metallic iron dust and silicon carbide grains in the dwarf galaxy Sextans A, roughly 4 million light-years away. These particles emerged from an asymptotic giant branch star in an environment of extremely low metallicity, where silicates would typically form but dust production was unexpected. "Webb revealed a star forging grains almost entirely made of iron," said Martha Boyer, an astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute. The discovery implies early galaxies had more diverse dust-making pathways than previously thought, even without heavy elements.

Also at the AAS meeting, University of Missouri researchers introduced nine compact galaxies from Webb's archives that blend traits in bewildering ways. Lead researcher Haojing Yan described them as a population defying categorization: they appear as tiny point sources without quasar or active galactic nucleus signatures, earning the moniker "ornithorhynchus of astronomy" for their taxonomic elusiveness, much like the platypus in biology. These revelations underscore Webb's power to challenge preconceptions, painting the early universe as far more inventive than scientists once imagined.