A study using data from telescopes on Earth and in the sky resolves a problem plaguing astronomers working in the infrared and could help make better observations of the composition of the universe with the James Webb Space Telescope and other instruments. The work is published April 20 in Nature Astronomy. 

The ancestors of galaxy clusters, the largest structures in the universe, have been identified by a team of astronomers including Brian Lemaux, who is affiliated with the UC Davis Department of Physics and Astronomy. Galaxies in the newly identified protoclusters are surprisingly sparse and dim, which may be why they have been so difficult to find until now. The work was published June 15 in Nature. The first galaxy clusters formed as matter began to clump together after the Big Bang. Galaxies formed within them and eventually, clusters and superclusters contained thousands of galaxies bound together by gravity. Conditions inside the cluster influence the size, shape and color of galaxies.

Some of the Milky Way’s oldest stars have been spotted in a surprising place — the disk that is our galaxy’s youngest region. Supercomputer simulations of their orbits suggest these metal-poor stars came from a smaller galaxy that slammed into the Milky Way more than 7 billion years ago.