Astronomers have discovered a surprising ‘UFO galaxies’ that appear as red, glowing disc-shaped objects in the blackness of space.
They found evidence of 56 ‘Ultra-red Flattened Objects’ after analyzing data collected by NASA‘s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), which had eluded previous telescopes, such as Hubble, for many years.
The UFO galaxy must have been hidden and the clouds of dust and debris that surround them, obscuring the light of their interstellar systems.
However, JWST has advanced technologyas well as seeing infrared light, it helped to capture fascinating images of these bright disks, some of which are located in areas closer to our Milky Way galaxy than astronomers had previously thought.
Drawing on these images and computer experiments, researchers of the University of Colorado Boulder (UCB) said that UFO galaxies are similar in size and shape to the Milky Way but are ‘much dustier.’
Author Justus Gibson said: ‘JWST is helping us see this kind of galaxy that we would never have seen before.’
“We thought that closer to us, we had a better understanding of all the types of galaxies that exist,” Gibson added. ‘It tells us that maybe we don’t understand the universe as much as we think.’
Gibson also explained that UFO galaxies appear red because they emit very little light. Most of the light that comes out of these galaxies is infrared visible light, and the little light that they do emit reaches the limit of what the human eye can see.
Above, two images of this same region of the universe show how ‘UFO galaxies’ eluded detection by early telescopes. The top image taken by the Hubble Space Telescope did not see the infrared heat that the James Webb Space Telescope image, below, picked up.
Researchers have discovered 56 UFO galaxies – possibly obscured by clouds of dust and debris that block the light from their inner star formations. Above, four more examples of infrared-emitting UFO galaxies that were hidden to Hubble (HST) but visible to James Webb (JWST)
A series of computer simulations, neural network emulators and mathematical models were used to determine the shape of the large, red UFO galaxies.
The team said they come in shapes like ‘flying discs’ and ‘prolate spheroids’ like rugby balls.
Each massive, red and emitting galaxy, researchers found, contains 50 times more dust than our own Milky Way galaxy.
Erica Nelson, a co-author of the study, said: ‘Why on earth do these galaxies have more dust than any other galaxy? I got it.’
The researchers looked at data from many well-documented galaxies before finally making a conclusion: the stars and planets inside UFO galaxies are hidden by dust clouds.
The team confidently compared this data with the total number of stars in each UFO galaxy (its stellar mass) and the change in the brightness of light and infrared radiation emitted from the center of each galaxy compared to its periphery.
The results clearly showed that the red light emitted by UFO galaxies is caused by obscuring dust and debris—rather than the dim light of distant galaxies billions of light-years away, which is thought to be that it formed within distant galaxies. the earliest times of the universe.
“UFOs have red colors all over their bodies but they still have less color, the outside is more red than the inside,” he said.
‘The appearance of these colors is probably controlled by the amount of interstellar dust and not by the age of the star,’ they concluded in their study, which was published in October. The Astrophysical Journal.
Above, there are many examples of 56 known UFO galaxies, with one “dust-free” galaxy in the upper left, published by researchers for comparison.
Above, another red galaxy UFO captured by James Webb. “It tells us that maybe we don’t understand the universe as well as we thought,” the study’s lead author Justus Gibson said.
Changes in the red and infrared light spectrum, as well as corresponding measurements from nearby blue-bright galaxies, allowed the team to estimate the number of new stars within UFO galaxies, another factor that may affect the light they emit.
“The number of UFOs studied here is not extreme in terms of stellar mass, SFR (star formation), or mass flux,” Gibson and his co-authors wrote.
The previously hidden UFOs were like this, ‘red objects whose faintness is mainly driven by dust.’
‘They are very impressive,’ said Nelson, an assistant professor of physics at CU Boulder.
‘It’s the red disks that appear in these images, and it was unexpected. They make you say, ‘What? What?”
Three more massive galaxies, emitting red light they are called ‘Red Monsters’ – each similar to the Milky Way – was also discovered this month, far away from Earth and close to the Big Bang site.
An international group of The astronomers who published their findings used the same methods to determine that their infrared galaxies were dust-free, giants far from Earth in time and space.
Both the Red Monster and the UFO galaxies, the researchers said, challenge current theories of how galaxies form.
Red Monsters show that galaxies were formed much earlier than previously thought and UFOs show that Earth’s gravity cannot gather all the material that orbits a young galaxy together into well-defined planets and stars, leaving behind a lot of dust and debris behind.
They ask you: ‘Why? What?” Dr Nelson said. ‘They are very interesting (…) They are very red disks visible in these images, and it was unexpected.’
