- 4027 - JAMES WEBB - telescope discoveries May, 2023? James Webb telescope just discovered the impossible'. These giant baby galaxies are shaking up our understanding of the early universe.
------- 4027 - JAMES WEBB - telescope discoveries May, 2023
- It is 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.
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- The 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 kms from Earth. Here, far from the heat glow of the
Earth, JWST can detect the faintest infrared light from the distant universe.
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- Among the pictures is a small red dot that
will shake up our understanding of how the first galaxies formed after the Big
Bang. After months of analysis discovering new types of galaxies. Galaxies that
the venerable Hubble Space Telescope had missed, even after decades of
surveying the sky.
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- "UFOs," the new galaxies,
"ultra-red flattened objects", because they 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.
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- 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.
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- Massive galaxies, seen 500–800 million
years after the Big Bang. Impossibly
early, impossibly massive galaxies.
Galaxies look like saucers, except one, the little red dot on the
screen. The distance is 13.1 billion
light years, the mass 100 billion stars. They just discovered the impossible.
Impossibly early, impossibly massive galaxies.
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- 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.
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- Could we have discovered astronomy's
missing link? There has been a long-standing puzzle in galaxy formation. 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.
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- These galaxies have stopped forming stars.
Dead galaxies, we call them, and some astronomers are obsessed with them. 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 because it could not see in the infrared light.
-
- 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 6 centimeters 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 6 centimeters.
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- There is a problem, however. These little
red dots have too many stars, too early. Stars form out of hydrogen gas, and
fundamental cosmological ("Big Bang") theory makes hard predictions
on how much gas is available to form stars.
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- To produce these galaxies so quickly, you
almost need all the gas in the universe to turn into stars at near 100%
efficiency. And that is very hard, which is the scientific term for impossible.
This discovery could transform our understanding of how the earliest galaxies
in the universe formed.
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- 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%.
-
- In a way, each of these candidates can be
considered a "black swan." The confirmation of even one would rule
out our current "all swans are white" model of galaxy formation, in
which all early galaxies grow slowly and gradually.
-
- 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.
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- It will also tell us what is producing the
light, whether it is stars or something else more exotic.
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- 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.
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- This is really exciting on the one hand,
because the origin of supermassive black holes in galaxies is not understood
either, and finding baby quasars might just hold the key. On the other hand,
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.
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- Could that be the answer for all of them?
Baby quasars everywhere? Probably not, but it will take another year to
investigate the remaining galaxies and find out. Stay tuned, there is more astronomy to go.
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May 27, 2023 JAMES WEBB -
telescope discoveries May, 2023
4027
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