- 4487
- JAMES WEBB
- sees the first stars? -
Using the James Webb Space Telescope, University of Copenhagen
researchers have become the first to see the formation of three of the earliest
galaxies in the universe, more than 13 billion years ago.
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---------------------------- 4487 - JAMES WEBB - sees the first stars?
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- Researchers have witnessed the birth of
three of the universe's absolute earliest galaxies, somewhere between 13.3 and
13.4 billion years ago. Through the
telescope, researchers were able to see signals from large amounts of gas that
accumulate and accrete onto a mini-galaxy in the process of being built. While
this is how galaxies are formed according to theories and computer simulations,
it had never actually been witnessed.
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- Whereas the James Webb has previously shown
us early galaxies at later stages of evolution, here we witness their very
birth, and thus, the construction of the first star systems in the universe
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- The researchers estimate the birth of the
three galaxies to have occurred roughly 400–600 million years after the Big
Bang, the explosion that began it all. While that sounds like a long time, it
corresponds to galaxies forming during the first 3–4% of the universe's
13.8-billion-year overall lifetime.
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- Shortly after the Big Bang, the universe was
an enormous opaque gas of hydrogen atoms, unlike today, where the night sky is
speckled with a blanket of well-defined stars.
The birth of galaxies took place at a time in the history of the
universe known as the “Epoch of Reionization”, when the energy and light of
some of the first galaxies broke through the mists of hydrogen gas.
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- It is precisely these large amounts of
hydrogen gas that the researchers captured using the James Webb Space
Telescope's infrared vision. This is the most distant measurement of the cold,
neutral hydrogen gas, which is the building block of the stars and galaxies,
discovered by scientific researchers to date.
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- The research team has already applied for
more observation time with the James Webb Space Telescope, with hopes of
expanding upon their new result and learning more about the earliest epoch in
the formation of galaxies.
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- One of the most fundamental questions that
we humans have always asked is 'Where do we come from?' Here, we piece together
a bit more of the answer by shedding light on the moment that some of the
universe's first structures were created.
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- The first set of scientific data captured
with the Euclid telescope, shows another exciting glimpse of the universe's
distant past. The telescope, launched in
July 2023, is part of the Dark Energy Satellite Mission, which aims to map the
dark universe. The mission seeks to
unlock mysteries of dark matter and dark energy, and reveal how and why the
universe looks as it does today.
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- Several new discoveries include:,
free-floating new-born planets, newly identified extragalactic star clusters,
new low-mass dwarf galaxies in a nearby galaxy cluster, the distribution of
dark matter and intracluster light in galaxy clusters, and very distant bright
galaxies from the first billion years of the universe.
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- As the European Space Agency publishes the
first findings from its Euclid space telescope, scientists from the University
of Surrey are celebrating fresh insights from the data. Studies show the gravity of the Milky Way
pulls clusters of stars apart, creating streams of stars trailing across the
galaxy.
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- Euclid will completely revolutionize our
view of the universe. Already these results are revealing important new
findings about local galaxies, new unknown dwarf galaxies, extrasolar planets
and some of the first galaxies. These results are only the tip of the iceberg
in terms of what will come. Soon Euclid will discover yet unknown details of
the dark energy and give a full picture of how galaxy formation occurred across
all cosmic time.
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- May we live in interesting times! A total of 24 hours were allocated to target
17 specific astronomical objects, from nearby clouds of gas and dust to distant
clusters of galaxies, producing stunning images that are invaluable for
scientific research. In just a single day, Euclid produced a catalog of more
than 11 million objects in visible light and five million more in infrared
light.
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- The most distant galaxies can only be
discovered using the longer near-infrared wavelengths seen by Euclid. What is amazing is that these images cover
an area of less than 1% of the full deep observations, showing that we expect
to detect thousands of early galaxies in the next few years with Euclid, which
will be revolutionary in understanding how and when galaxies formed after the
Big Bang.
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- The images obtained by Euclid are at least
four times sharper than those that can be taken from ground-based telescopes.
They cover large patches of sky at unrivaled depth, looking far into the
distant universe using both visible and infrared light.
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- The Euclid Consortium includes more than
2,600 members, including over 1,000 researchers from more than 300 laboratories
in 15 European countries, plus Canada, Japan and United States, covering
various fields in astrophysics, cosmology, theoretical physics, and particle
physics.
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- The mission is ambitious and such complex
fundamental science is at the very beginning of an exciting journey to map the
structure of the universe.
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May 28, 2024 JAMES WEBB
- sees the first stars? 4487
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--------------------- --- Wednesday, May 29, 2024
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