How do you cool down a phoenix? I don't mean the mythological birds of flame and rebirth, but rather a cosmic namesake with a fittingly fiery nature.
Using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), astronomers may finally have the answer. They used the powerful instrument to investigate the extreme cooling of gas in the Phoenix cluster, a grouping of galaxies bound by gravity located around 5.8 billion light-years from Earth.
Stars can only form when gas is cool enough to clump together in overly dense patches, which is why scientists are particularly interested in how the Phoenix cluster forms stars. Indeed, this section of the universe forms stars at an incredible rate.
