Saint Mary University
Galaxy Building Blocks at High Redshift — Early stages of galaxy formation are thought to involve repeated cycles of merging sub-galactic building blocks, accompanied by tidally induced bursts of star formation. To test this scenario, this project uses JWST’s Integral Field Spectrograph to observationally and in detail examine an archetypical example of such a merging system that we discovered just one billion years after the Big Bang. With these data, the team will examine the conditions in this interacting galaxy pair, including the conditions in the interstellar gas in the system. The analysis of this data will shed new light on the early phases of the formation of galaxies like our own Milky Way.