New Delhi

James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has not made any news today, said no space enthusiast ever. The telescope has clicked so many images of the cosmos and has yielded so much information, before sending another treasure-trove of celestial secrets that its almost every day that something or the other stands out from its observations. Now, scientists have found that JWST has serendipitously clicked a galaxy that's 'photobombing' other galaxies in the picture.

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What's more, the scientists were not looking for the photobombing galaxy to start with.

The observation was being made under JWST's PEARLS (Prime Extragalactic Areas for Reionization and Lensing Science) observing programme and the telescope was aimed at a galaxy cluster designated as CLG1212. But as the scientists trained JWST's lenses at the galaxy cluster, they found a wispy body in the background.

This was PEARLSDG, the galaxy responsible for photobombing the galaxy cluster in front of it. PEARLSDG is an isolated dwarf galaxy and scientists found that there was no star-forming activity in the galaxy.

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Isolated dwarf galaxies usually exhibit star-forming activity. An estimated 100 million stars are present in this dwarf galaxy. This number may look large but when compared with number of stars in the Milky Way galaxy (400 billion) it's pretty evident why the former is called dwarf galaxy.

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The team, led by Tim Carleton, who is an Assistant Research Scientist at Arizona University, has published their study in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

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"Consistent with its low level of UV emission and the lack of emission lines in its spectrum, we find a very low sSFR, suggesting that its star formation shut off over 1 Gyr ago," say the researchers in the paper.

1 Gyr is equal to 1 billion years.

"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," said lead author Carleton.

(With inputs from agencies)