NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), which will be the successor to the Hubble Space Telescope, will be used in two studies that will investigate the neighboring dwarf galaxies of Milky Way and Andromeda. The studies will attempt to uncover the properties of dark matter and how large galaxies are formed

Like Hubble, which is jointly operated by NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA), the JWST will also be co-managed by various agencies. Aside from NASA, the upcoming space telescope will also be operated by the ESA and the Canadian Space Agency.

The JWST is scheduled to launch on March 30, 2021. Since it will have better capabilities than Hubble, agencies are hoping that the new space telescope will be able to uncover new information regarding various cosmic bodies and structures.

Once the JWST has been launched, it will be used in two studies that aim to understand galaxy formations. In the first study, the JWST will observe the movements of stars in the dwarf galaxies Draco and Sculptor near Milky Way.

Through the space telescope, authors of the study will observe how the motions of stars are affected by the gravitational force of dark matter, which is a mysterious element believe to account for 85 percent of all cosmic materials in the universe. By studying the movements of stars, researchers are hoping to understand how dark matter is distributed within Draco and Sculptor.

“How structures in the universe formed depends on the properties of the dark matter that comprises most of the mass in the universe,” Roeland van der Marel, the principal investigator for the two studies, said in a statement.

“So we know there’s dark matter, but we don’t know what actually makes up this dark matter,” he added. “We just know that there is something in the universe that has gravity and it pulls on things, but we don’t really know what it is.”

For the second study, the space telescope will be used to analyze the motions of four dwarf galaxies near Milky Way’s neighbor, Andromeda. With the help of the JWST, van der Marel and his team will try to determine if the galaxies around Andromeda move within a flat plane or in all directions.

The objective of this study is to see how large galaxies such as Andromeda form through the accumulation and accretion of smaller galaxies.

Sculptor Galaxy
The dwarf galaxy Sculptor, above, is a companion to the Milky Way galaxy. Astronomers will use Webb to study the motions of stars in Sculptor and Draco, another dwarf companion to the Milky Way. By studying how the stars move, the researchers will be able to determine how the dark matter is distributed in these galaxies. ESA/Hubble, Digitized Sky Survey 2
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