Capotaurus is located near the tail of the constellation Ursa Major
A new object discovered by the James Webb Telescope, named Capotaurus, may be the oldest known galaxy in the universe. It is being described by astronomers as “one of the most enigmatic discoveries” to date.
In a recent study in arXivastronomers observed a very bright and mysterious object that could be a galaxy that emerged just 100 million years after the Big Bang.
If confirmed – as the study has yet to be peer reviewed – this will be the oldest known galaxy in the universe.
Alternatively, as writes, Capotauro It may be an extraordinary brown dwarf (a “failed star” that is more massive than the largest gas giant planets but not large enough to sustain nuclear fusion at its core) that lives on the outer edges of the Milky Way.
“Capotauro, whatever it is, looks really interesting and promising,” said co-author Giovanni Gandolfiastrophysicist at the National Institute of Astrophysics, in Italy, speaking to the same magazine.
It is important to highlight that the team has not yet been able to decisively determine Capotauro’s identity. However, the two most likely options are identified.
One of the two
Under the primordial galaxy interpretation, it has been consistently concluded that Capotaurus formed about 100 million years after the Big Bang — pushing back the age of the oldest known galaxy by about 200 million years. It was estimated that it would be gigantic, with more than a billion solar masses.
The other possibility is that Capotauro is a very unusual brown dwarf. If this is the case, Capotauro would be the coldest and most distant brown dwarf known in our galaxy, more than seven light-years away and at just 27°C.
Both possibilities are “very exciting”because they challenge what we thought we knew about our own galaxy and about how galaxies form and evolve in general, Gandolfi told Live Science.
Muhammad Latifan astrophysicist at the University of the UAE who was not involved in the research, said Capotauro is “one of the most enigmatic discoveries” of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) to date.
“It is a very intriguing in the sense that whichever way we interpret it, it’s basically pushing the limits of our knowledge to the extreme,” he told Live Science.
