- 3951 - JAMES WEBB - discoveries early galaxies? - The James Webb Space Telescope has discovered a group of galaxies from the dawn of the universe that are so massive they shouldn't exist. The six gargantuan galaxies contain almost as many stars as the Milky Way despite forming only 500 to 700 million years after the Big Bang.
------------ 3951 - JAMES WEBB - discoveries early galaxies?
- If these
early galaxies are real, the discovery calls our entire understanding of galaxy
formation into question. Astronomers did not expect the early universe to be
able to organize itself that quickly. These galaxies should not have had time
to form.
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- Cosmologists
previously estimated that the process began slowly taking shape within the
first few hundred million years after the Big Bang. Currently accepted theories
suggest that 1 to 2 billion years into the universe's life, these early
protogalaxies reached adolescence forming into dwarf galaxies that began devouring
each other to grow into ones like our own.
-
- Because
light travels at a fixed speed through the vacuum of space, the deeper we look
into the universe, the more remote light we intercept and the further back in
time we see. By using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) to peer roughly
13.5 billion years into the past, the astronomers found that enormous galaxies
had already burst into life very quickly after the Big Bang, when the universe
was just 3% of its current age.
-
- The galaxies
are so massive, they are in tension with 99 percent of the models for
cosmology. This means that either the
models need to be altered, or scientific understanding of galaxy formation
requires a fundamental rethink.
-
- The Milky
Way forms about one to two new stars every year. Some of these galaxies would have to be
forming hundreds of new stars a year for the entire history of the universe. If
even one of these galaxies is real, it will push against the limits of our
understanding of cosmology. All evidence
points to these celestial objects being galaxies, but the astronomers haven't
ruled out that some of them could be enormous quasars or supermassive black
holes.
-
- The amount
of mass discovered means that the known mass in stars at this period of our
universe is up to 100 times greater than we had previously thought. Even if we
cut the sample in half, this is still an astounding change.
-
- Previous
imaging of the early universe by the Hubble Space Telescope didn't detect the
giant galaxies, but JWST is about 100 times more powerful than Hubble. The $10 billion JWST launched to a
gravitationally stable location beyond the moon's orbit, known as a Lagrange
point, in December 2021.
-
- The space
observatory was designed to read the earliest chapters of the universe's
history in its faintest glimmers of light, which have been stretched to
infrared frequencies from billions of years of travel across the expanding
fabric of space-time.
-
- The next
step will be to take a spectrum image of the giant galaxies providing astronomers with accurate distances
and a better idea of the chemical makeup of these anachronistic monsters hiding
at the beginning of the universe.
-
April 8, 2023 JAMES
WEBB - discoveries early galaxies 3951
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