A Dense Cosmic Knot in The Early Universe; And A "Halo" Of Dark Matter Around It...

This is the answer to the overnight puzzler in the masthead at right.

This is not one proto-galaxy, but in fact. . . three of them. They are orbiting each other at extremely high speeds. That in turn would indicate a great deal of mass is present near the centrifugal center of the three. When combined with how closely they are packed into the region around this quasar, the team believes this marks one of the densest known areas of galaxy formation in the early universe.

The team thinks they could be seeing a region where two massive "halos" of dark matter are merging together. This dark matter is an invisible component of the universe that holds galaxies and galaxy clusters together. In this image, dark matter is forming a “halo” that extends beyond the stars, to hold all of them tightly together, revolving speedily around one another.

A "shepherding moon" effect -- but on the hundreds of thousands of light years scale, very early in the known universe. Thus this is very, very far away -- since this light only recently reached us. Whoosh! Here is the full story, from the Goddard team, at NASA:

. . .Previous studies by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope and other observatories called attention to the quasar’s powerful outflows, and astronomers had speculated that its host galaxy could be merging with some unseen partner. But the team was not expecting [redacted's] NIRSpec data to clearly indicate it was not just one galaxy, but at least three more swirling around it. Thanks to spectra over a broad area, the motions of all this surrounding material could be mapped, resulting in the conclusion that the red quasar was in fact part of a dense knot of galaxy formation.

“There are few galaxy protoclusters known at this early time. It’s hard to find them, and very few have had time to form since the big bang,” said astronomer Dominika Wylezalek of Heidelberg University in Germany, who led the study with [the newest 'scope]. “This may eventually help us understand how galaxies in dense environments evolve. It’s an exciting result.”

Using the observations from NIRSpec, the team was able to confirm three galactic companions to this quasar and show how they are connected. Archival data from Hubble hint that there may be even more. Images from Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3 had shown extended material surrounding the quasar and its galaxy, prompting its selection for this study into its outflow and the effects on its host galaxy. Now, the team suspects they could have been looking at the core of a whole cluster of galaxies -- only now revealed by [redacted's] crisp imaging. . . .

And this puts us in mind of a winter's night, six years ago, when we last discussed shepherd moons at length, and the poetry that arrives with them. Here is that bit:

. . . .Waterlilies soon and a Pleiku of dragonflies.

Shipwrecked fleets of naked limbs. . .
buried at sea -- wrapped
in a starmap of the sky. . . .

I will forget I am aging. I will be a medicine bag
of healing metaphors and powerful occult charms. . . I will
lie down upon the earth in the unassuming grass
after I’ve finished painting, fascinated by the. . .
stranger I’ve become to myself, listening deeply
to the picture music of the life of the mind like a kid
with forty-eight crayons and the whole of the sky to draw on
as I wait for the stars to make themselves apparent
in the sweet, sweet darkness that envelopes me. . .
in the [copper-colored] flames and [deep-]violet shadows of another
[exquisite] martyr -- to the cause of keeping their fires alive within me,
a dragonfly in a chrysalis, a hermit thrush in ecstasy,
a sulphur butterfly with antennae like burnt match sticks
looking for a light from the lanterns of the nightwatch
reigniting the passions of old poems like fireflies
inspiring the ashes in the urns of the stars to enlighten their afterlife. . .
fracturing koans like diamond insights into
a labyrinthine gallery of mirrors that see me
with the same eyes by which I see signs
of the disastrous happiness of life in them. . . .

With that, I will quite easily drift off to sleep, shepherded once more, by my own moon-lette -- somewhere, to the South, out there. . . smile. G'night. . . .

नमस्ते