- 4329 - WEBB - discovers habitable planet? - 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.
------------------------- 4329 - WEBB - discovers habitable plane
- The James Webb Telescope is orbiting in the
gravity well between Earth and the Moon.
It can see into deep space by collecting photons that have traveled over
14 billion years.
-
- Scientists using JWST have 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. Scientists used the JWST’s infrared
camera to investigate a molecular cloud, “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 also hold the building blocks of
habitable worlds: carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen and sulfur, a molecular
cocktail known as “COHNS”.
-
- This is 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. This matter
starts to collide, sticking together and eventually forming larger bodies. These clumps
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.
-
- 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.
-
- 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.
-
- James Webb Telescope has spotted other
galaxies from the dawn of time that are so massive they 'shouldn't exist. It 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 gargantuan galaxies, which 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". The discovery calls our entire understanding
of galaxy formation into question.
-
- Scientists 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 before 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
JWST to peer 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 researchers say 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 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 these galaxies are real, it will push against the
limits of our understanding of cosmology.
-
- Right now, 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.
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 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 astronomers say their next step will be
to take a spectrum image of the giant galaxies providing them with accurate
distances and a better idea of the chemical makeup of the monsters hiding at
the beginning of the universe.
-
-
January 25, 2023 WEBB - discovers
habitable planet? 4329
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