Almost every galaxy in the Universe harbors a supermassive black hole accreting matter (i.e. gas and dust) from its surroundings. As the gas falls toward the supermassive black hole, it forms an accretion disk, which releases enormous amounts of energy in the form of light. The resulting radiation exerts a force that accelerates the interstellar medium gas at very high speeds (up to 1000 km/s, equivalent to about 4 million km/h). This outflowing gas is generally dubbed galactic winds.
In recent years, various theoretical models and cosmological simulations have shown that these flows of matter play a fundamental role in the evolutive process of both the host galaxy and the supermassive black hole that generated them. Nonetheless, from the experimental/observational point of view, the importance of these phenomena is still widely debated and very little is known about galactic winds in the earliest stages of galaxy evolution within the first two billion years of the Universe (i.e. the epoch of fastest growth of supermassive black holes and galaxies and when galactic winds are expected to be more powerful).
To study the properties of distant galaxies and detect galactic winds, spectroscopic observations in the near-infrared wavelength range are essential. However, these observations cannot be performed using ground-based facilities and require space telescopes. In this regard, the launch of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) on December 25, 2021, marked a significant advancement in our quest to understand the formation and evolution of first galaxy populations.
The WINGS project exploits JWST data to identify and characterize outflowing gas in the most distant galaxies, building the first census of galactic winds across early cosmic epochs. In parallel, the project focuses on investigating the impact of outflowing gas on the host galaxy in order to quantify the role played by galactic winds in the galaxy formation and evolution processes. Finally, the properties of galactic winds are compared with those expected by state-of-art cosmological simulations to verify the predictions of theoretical models.
