According to this team of researchers, they discovered an interesting dwarf galaxy that truly shouldn’t be possible. Yet somehow, it does.

They discovered this dwarf galaxy by using the JWST. Surprisingly, they were looking for something else entirely. This galaxy wasn’t their primary target to observe. Yet once they saw it, they decided to look a little further.

Gravity binds galaxies, and all their stars and planets, together. Gas, dark matter, and clouds of dust also encompass a galaxy. While there are obvious similarities between regular galaxies and dwarf galaxies, dwarf ones are very small. They have about 100 million stars, on average. The Milky Way, by comparison, has about 200 billion stars.

They weren’t expecting to see anything in this area of space, so they were already surprised when they began to look at this dwarf galaxy. Then, they began to realize something was very unique about PEARLSDG.

Scientists found that this dwarf galaxy isn’t interacting with any other nearby galaxies. It also isn’t forming any new stars. As a result, they’ve claimed that this galaxy is isolated — and very interesting.

Carleton said, “These types of isolated quiescent dwarf galaxies haven’t really been seen before except for relatively few cases. They are not really expected to exist given our current understanding of galaxy evolution, so the fact that we see this object helps us improve our theories for galaxy formation. Generally, dwarf galaxies that are out there by themselves are continuing to form new stars.”

If a galaxy is not forming new stars, then it is interacting with a nearby galaxy, often a much bigger galaxy. However, PEARLSDG didn’t meet any of these characteristic requirements of a galaxy.

Carleton writes in the paper: “A wealth of observations has long suggested that the majority of isolated classical dwarf galaxies are currently star forming. Recent observations of the large abundance of “ultra-diffuse galaxies” beyond the reach of previous large spectroscopic surveys suggests that our understanding of the dwarf galaxy population may be incomplete.”

“[PEARLSDG’s] internal processes aren’t thought to be strong enough to remove gas, so interactions with other galaxies or groups of galaxies are thought to be the only way that gas is removed from the galaxy and star formation is shut down.”

As a result, they’ve realized it’s one of the farthest galaxies from us that allows us to still see stars in detail. They believe PEARLSDG is about 98 million light-years away.

By using these methods, they can see new stars that have a certain color signature. This galaxy had none of these colors — which led them to realize it wasn’t creating any new stars, something they’d never seen before.

“This was absolutely against people’s expectations for a dwarf galaxy like this,” Carleton explained.

Using imaging data ranging from ultraviolet, optical, and infrared wavelengths, the researchers studied the colors of the stars. The stars do not have the colors of newly formed stars, showing that the galaxy is not producing any. Using the Doppler effect, the PEARLSDG was shown to be solitary.

This also has led many scientists to believe that there may be more isolated galaxies out there in space, similar to PEARLSDG, just waiting to be found. Now, thanks to the JWST, they can actually find them.

This latest discovery further highlights how the JWST can help scientists learn more about space and galaxies.

The JWST’s Near Infrared Camera has very high angular resolution and sensitivity, allowing the team to see individual stars in far-off galaxies. This technology was the icing on the cake that brought together the range of imaging data the research team compiled.

The light has been named JWST-7329 and is 11.5 billion years old. Most poignantly, it does not make any sense for it to be there. Scientists remain baffled over its reason for being there.

The reason it does not make sense is because there was not enough dark matter in the early universe to allow the formation of this red light. It is yet another galaxy discovered by JWST that should not exist.

Before this year, the JWST-7329 was under seven long years of observation using the grounded Keck telescope in Hawaii and Very Large Telescopes in Chile. All they were able to see before the use of the JWST was a faint red smudge.

They also used data from the DeVeny Optical Spectrograph on the Lowell Telescope in Arizona. The team also took advantage of archival imaging from NASA’s Galaxy Evolution Explorer (Galex), the Spitzer, ground-based imaging from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, and the Dark Energy Camera Legacy Survey.

Glazebrook told Cosmos magazine: “NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, it’s been such an incredible thing. I’ve been wanting it for the last 30 years and it’s delivering on all those dreams we’ve had.”

These two galaxies undermine what astronomers understand about how dwarf galaxies tend to form and evolve. These discoveries may lead to some major reworking of our understanding of how the universe came to be.

Glazebrook said: “We did the calculations of how old it is and it’s way beyond the bounds of what’s reasonable to form in the cold dark matter dominated universe. It’s a really huge puzzle. I hope it points to the revision of how dark matter halos assemble and how galaxies are made.

Carleton wrote: “More detailed analysis of the star formation history of PEARLSDG and the dynamics of PEARLSDG with respect to its surroundings are needed to further understand its formation history, but this discovery suggests the possibility that many isolated quiescent galaxies are waiting to be identified and that JWST has the tools to do so.