- 3891 - EARLIEST GALAXIES - Webb discoveries? - Astronomers are poring over the very first images from the brand new James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). July 2022, barely a week after those first images from the revolutionary super telescope were released. Twenty-five years in the making, a hundred to a thousand times more powerful than any previous telescope, one of the biggest and most ambitious scientific experiments in human history, and what do we see?
------------- 3891 - EARLIEST GALAXIES - Webb discoveries?
- The Webb
telescope took decades to build, because it had to be made foldable to fit on
top of a rocket and be sent into the coldness of space, 1.5 million kilometers
from Earth. Far from the heat glow of
the Earth, Webb can detect the faintest infrared light from the distant
universe.
-
- Among the
pictures is a small red dot that will shake up our understanding of how the
first galaxies formed after the Big Bang.
"UFOs," the new galaxies,
ultra-red flattened objects, that all look like flying saucers. In the color
images they appear very red because all the light is coming out in the
infrared, while the galaxies are invisible at wavelengths humans can see.
-
- Infrared is
JWST's superpower, allowing it to spy the most distant galaxies. Ultraviolet
and visible light from the first stars and galaxies that formed after the Big
Bang is stretched out by the expansion of the universe as it travels towards
us, so by the time the light reaches us we see it as infrared light.
-
- All of
Erica's galaxies look like saucers, except one.
This is something very different, distance 13.1 billion light years,
mass 100 billion stars. Impossibly early, impossibly massive galaxies.
-
- At this distance,
the light took 13 billion years to reach us, so we are seeing the galaxies at a
time when the universe was only 700 million years old, barely 5% of its current
age of 13.8 billion years. If this is true, this galaxy has formed as many
stars as our present-day Milky Way. In record time. One day later I had found six.
-
- Could we
have discovered astronomy's missing link?
As we look out in space and back in time, we see the "corpses"
of fully formed, mature galaxies appear seemingly out of nowhere around 1.5
billion years after the Big Bang.
-
- These
galaxies have stopped forming stars. The
stellar ages of these dead galaxies suggest they must have formed much earlier
in the universe, but Hubble has never been able to spot their earlier, living
stages.
-
- Early dead
galaxies are truly bizarre creatures, packing as many stars as the Milky Way,
but in a size 30 times smaller. Imagine an adult, weighing 100 kilos, but
standing 6cm tall. Our little red dots are equally bizarre. They look like baby
versions of the same galaxies, also weighing in at 100 kilos, with a height of
6cm. Too many stars, too early
-
- To produce
these galaxies so quickly, you almost need all the gas in the universe to turn
into stars at near 100% efficiency. This discovery could transform our
understanding of how the earliest galaxies in the universe formed. The implication is that there is different
channel, a fast track, that produces monster galaxies very quickly, very
efficiently. A fast track for the top 1%.
-
- The first
step to solve this mystery is to confirm the distances with spectroscopy, where
we put the light of each of these galaxies through a prism, and split it into
its rainbow-like fingerprint. This will tell us the distance to 0.1% accuracy. It will also tell us what is producing the
light, whether it is stars or something else more exotic.
-
- By
chance, month earlier, JWST already
targeted one of the six candidate massive galaxies and it turned out to be a
distant baby quasar. A quasar is a phenomenon that occurs when gas falls into a
supermassive black hole at the center of a galaxy and starts to shine brightly.
-
- Quasars can
outshine their entire host galaxy, so it is impossible to tell how many stars
are there and whether the galaxy is really that massive. Could that be the
answer for all of them? Baby quasars everywhere?
-
February 26, 2023 EARLIEST
GALAXIES - Webb discoveries? 3891
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