- 4079 - OLDEST GALAXIES - ever detected? James Webb telescope detects the earliest strand in the 'cosmic web' ever seen. The Space Telescope has discovered a clump of ancient galaxies that may be the oldest strand of the "cosmic web" ever detected.
----------------- 4079 - OLDEST GALAXIES - ever detected?
- On a clear night,
it might look like the stars above are distributed more or less evenly. But
that isn't the case. All stars are part
of a gigantic cosmic web that links galaxies across the universe like threads
of spider's silk, leaving unfathomably large swaths of nothingness in
between. This massive cosmic highway
stretches back nearly to the dawn of the universe.
-
- These are massive,
gassy tendrils composed of 10 closely packed galaxies stretching over 3 million
light-years. According to the researchers, this ancient filament of gas and
stars may represent the oldest known thread of the cosmic web.
-
- The newly
discovered filament formed when the universe was very young, a mere 830 million
years after the Big Bang. It is anchored by an extremely bright celestial
object with a supermassive black hole known as a quasar at its center.
-
- This is one of the
earliest filamentary structures that people have ever found associated with a
distant quasar. Black holes helped to
form the cosmic web by acting as gravity wells to draw matter together, and
occasionally by flinging it far away on "cosmic winds," which whip up
around extremely active quasars. Gravity keeps these strands of stars and dust
connected, even as the winds pull them across the universe.
-
- Eventually, the
filament will condense into a cluster of galaxies, similar to the Coma Cluster,
which lies approximately 330 million light-years from Earth.
-
- The Webb Space
Telescope has observed and measured the coldest ice in the deepest reaches of
an interstellar molecular cloud to date. The frozen molecules measured minus
440 degrees Fahrenheit.
-
- Molecular clouds,
made up of frozen molecules, gasses and dust particles, serve as the birthplace
of stars and planets, including habitable planets, like ours. The JWST’s infrared camera to investigate a
molecular cloud called Chameleon I, about 500 light-years from Earth.
-
- Within the dark,
cold cloud, they identified frozen molecules like carbonyl sulfur, ammonia,
methane, methanol and more. These molecules will someday be a part of the hot
core of a growing star, and possibly part of future exoplanets. They hold the
building blocks of habitable worlds: carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen and
sulfur, a molecular cocktail known as COHNS.
-
- These results
provide insights into the initial, dark chemistry stage of the formation of ice
on the interstellar dust grains that will grow into the centimeter-sized
pebbles from which planets form. Stars
and planets form within molecular clouds like Chameleon I.
-
- Over millions of
years, the gases, ices and dust collapse into more massive structures. Some of
these structures heat up to become the cores of young stars. As the stars grow,
they sweep up more and more material and get hotter and hotter. Once a star
forms, the leftover gas and dust around it form a disk. Once more, this matter
starts to collide, sticking together and eventually forming larger bodies. One
day, these clumps may become planets. Even habitable ones like ours.
-
- The JWST sent back
its first images in July, 2022, and
scientists are currently using the $10 billion telescope's instruments to
demonstrate what kinds of measurements are possible. To identify molecules
within Chameleon I, researchers used light from stars lying beyond the
molecular cloud. As the light shines towards us, it is absorbed in
characteristic ways by the dust and molecules inside the cloud. These
absorption patterns can then be compared to known patterns determined in the
lab.
-
- They also found
more complex molecules they can't specifically identify. But the finding proves
that complex molecules do form in molecular clouds before they're used up by
growing stars.
-
- Complex organic
molecules, like methanol and potentially ethanol, also suggests that the many
star and planetary systems developing in this particular cloud will inherit
these molecules.
-
- How a habitable
world like ours got its icy COHNS is still a major question among astronomers.
One theory is that COHNS were delivered to Earth via collisions with icy comets
and asteroids.
-
This is just the first in a series of spectral snapshots that
we will obtain to see how the ices evolve from their initial synthesis to the
comet-forming regions of protoplanetary disks.
This will tell us which mixture of ices and therefore which elements can
eventually be delivered to the surfaces of terrestrial exoplanets or
incorporated into the atmospheres of giant gas or ice planets.
-
-
July 7, 2023 OLDEST GALAXIES
- ever detected? 4079
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Friday, July 7, 2023
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