- 4271 -
FARTHEST GALAXY ? James Webb telescope finds 'vanishing'
galaxy from the beginning of the
universe. The early galaxy “AzTECC71” is
so far away it keeps disappearing from telescope observations. But a new study
by the James Webb finally pins it down.
-------------------------- 4271 - FARTHEST GALAXY ?
- This galaxy is a
very blurry, highly dust-obscured resident of the universe whose name is only a
string of numbers and letters. It even sits at a distance so far from Earth
that it slips in and out of the watchful eyes of various telescopes. The image,
captured by the powerful James Webb Space Telescope, spotlights galaxy
“AzTECC71”.
-
- What's striking
here is that we're seeing AzTECC71 the way it was just 900 million years after
the Big Bang. That's when the universe was turning on its very first stars,
absolute eons before our solar system was born.
That science always amazes me. We
are looking backwards in time.
-
- The telescope's
view of this galaxy as a hazy speck of light is a far cry from many other
glorious images of galaxies and galaxy clusters in its repertoire. However,
even this smudge holds important lessons for our understanding of the early
universe.
-
- This could mean
the early universe was much dustier than previously thought, shedding a little
more “light” on how it evolved since the Big Bang occurred roughly 13.8 billion
years ago.
-
- AzTECC71 was first
spotted as an incomprehensible blob of light by the James Clerk Maxwell
Telescope in Hawaii. Later, it was also
seen by the ALMA radio telescope in Chile. Then, however, it seemed to vanish
in images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope.
-
- This thing is
actually forming hundreds of new stars every year. Before the JWST, these galaxies were close
to impossible to seek out. The light from birthing stars, sitting deep within
dust-shrouded galaxies, was absorbed in optical wavelengths by the dust itself
and re-emitted at faint, longer wavelengths that the JWST can pick up. One in
five such galaxies had remained invisible to Hubble, forming a group of what
astronomers call "Hubble-dark galaxies”.
-
- That means our
understanding of the history of galaxy evolution is biased because we're only
seeing the unobscured, less dusty galaxies and not the rest of them.
-
-
December 18, 2023
FARTHEST GALAXY ? 4271
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Monday, December 18, 2023 ---------------------------------
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