- 4317 - JAMES WEBB - finds habitable planets? The James Webb Telescope detected the coldest ice in the known universe and it contains the building blocks of life. The latest observations of icy molecules will help scientists understand how habitable planets form.
--------------- 4317 – JAMES WEBB - finds habitable planets?
- JWST 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.
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- Molecular clouds,
made up of frozen molecules, gases and dust particles, serve as the birthplace
of stars and planets, including habitable planets. The JWST’s infrared camera was used to
investigate a molecular cloud called “Chameleon I”, about 500 light-years from
Earth.
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- Within the dark,
cold cloud, the team 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 also hold
the building blocks of habitable worlds: carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen and
sulfur, a “molecular cocktail” known as “COHNS”.
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- 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.
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- 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. This matter starts to collide, sticking
together and eventually forming larger bodies. One day, these clumps may become
planets. Even habitable ones like ours.
-
- These observations
open a new window on the formation pathways for the simple and complex
molecules that are needed to make the building blocks of life.
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- 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.
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- The team 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. Identification of
complex organic molecules, like methanol and potentially ethanol, also suggests
that the many star and planetary systems developing in this particular cloud
will inherit molecules in a fairly advanced chemical state.
-
- 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
proto-planetary 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.
-
- The Webb Telescope
also spotted six gigantic galaxies, each roughly the size of our own Milky Way,
that formed at a very fast pace, taking shape just 500 million years after the
Big Bang.
-
- The six massive
galaxies, whose ages range between 500 to 800 million years after the Big Bang.
They are so massive they shouldn't exist.
They contain almost as many stars as the Milky Way despite forming only
500 to 700 million years after the Big Bang, have been dubbed "universe
breakers" by the team of astronomers that spotted them.
-
- That's because, if
they're real, the discovery calls our entire understanding of galaxy formation
into question. You just don't expect the
early universe to be able to organize itself that quickly. These galaxies
should not have had time to form.
-
- We don't know
exactly when the first clumps of stars began to merge into the beginnings of
the galaxies we see today, but 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.
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- 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 JWST to peer roughly 13.5 billion years into the past, the
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.
-
- This is our first
glimpse back this far. While the data
indicates they are likely galaxies, I think there is a real possibility that a
few of these objects turn out to be obscured supermassive black holes.
Regardless, the amount of mass we 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.
-
- 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 accurate distances and a better idea of the
chemical makeup of the monsters hiding at the beginning of the universe.
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-
January 15, 2023
JAMES WEBB
- finds habitable planets? 4317
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