- 4351 - EARLIEST GALAXIES and LIFE? The James Webb Telescope detected the coldest ice in the known universe. It contains the building blocks of life. Scientists 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.
------------------------- 4351 - EARLIEST GALAXIES and LIFE?
- Molecular clouds, made up of frozen
molecules, gasses and dust particles, serve as the birthplace of stars and
planets, including habitable planets, like ours. Scientists used the JWST’s
infrared camera to investigate a molecular cloud called Chameleon I, about 500
light-years from Earth.
-
- 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, according to the researchers.
They also 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.
-
- Our 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.
-
- Although the team was thrilled to observe
COHNS within the cold, molecular soup, they didn't find as high a concentration
of the molecules as they were expecting in a dense cloud like Chameleon I. 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.
-
- The James Webb Space Telescope also spotted
six gigantic galaxies, each roughly the size of our own Milky Way, that formed
at a bafflingly 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" 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.
-
- 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, 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 JWST to
peer roughly 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 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.
-
- While the data indicates they are likely
galaxies 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. Even if we cut the sample in
half, this is still an astounding change.
-
- 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.
-
-
February 12, 2024 EARLIEST
GALAXIES and LIFE?
4351
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--------------------- --- Monday, February 12,
2024
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