- 4497 - WEBB TELESCOPE - new discoveries? One yearin operation and Webb discoveries are changing astronomy. The oldest ever black holes, a preview of our solar system's gory demise, and a measurement of distant starlight that threatens to bring the standard of cosmology crashing down are some JWST's discoveries of 2023.
----------------------------------- 4497 - WEBB TELESCOPE - new discoveries?
- Spotting six 'impossible' galaxies at the
dawn of time. Not long after coming
online, the JWST immediately discovered six enormous "universe
breaker" galaxies, containing what seemed to be almost as many stars as
the Milky Way, dating to just 500 million years after the Big Bang.
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- The strange discovery pointed to a
deepening mystery around how large galaxies first bloomed in our universe. The galaxy “MACS0647-JD” spotted just 400
million years after the Big Bang. Put
simply, the universe is expanding, but depending on where cosmologists look,
it's doing so at different rates.
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- In the past, the two best experiments to
measure the expansion rate were the European Space Agency's Planck satellite
(which gave a most likely expansion rate of 67 kilometers per second per
megaparsec) and the Hubble Space telescope, which studied pulsating stars
called Cepheids and found a higher value of 73 km/s/Mpc.
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- The JWST newest result was an expansion rate of 74
km/s/Mpc. Since then, cosmology has
lurched deeper into a "crisis" that could reveal new physics or even
break the standard model.
-
- There weren't just inexplicably large
ancient galaxies on the JWST's list of discoveries this year, but whopping
black holes too. The first, “CEERS 1019”, had a mass 10 million times that of
our sun and was found by the JWST just 570 million years after the Big Bang
making it the oldest black hole ever spotted at the time of its discovery in
April 2023.
-
- The telescope discovered an even older
massive black hole 440 million years after the universe began. How these gigantic space-time ruptures
swelled to such staggering scales so early on is an ongoing mystery.
-
- Astrophysicists are currently exploring
options that include the black holes being formed from the rapid collapse of
giant gas clouds, although they haven't ruled out that some may have been
seeded by hypothesized "primordial" black holes, thought to be
created moments after the universe began.
-
- The telescope has also revealed glimpses of completely new,
unexplainable objects. After being trained on the Orion Nebula, the JWST found
42 pairs of Jupiter-mass binary objects, or "JuMBOs" , Jupiter-sized
planets drifting through space in pairs, some as far apart from each other as
390 times the distance between Earth and the sun.
-
- The JuMBOs are too small to be stars, but
as they bafflingly exist in pairs, they are unlikely to be rogue planets
ejected from solar systems. Their discovery has alerted astronomers to a
brand-new formation mechanism for planets or even for failed stars.
-
- Another feature of the JWST is its ability
to measure a spectrum of the atmospheres of distant exoplanets. This enabled it to spot the potential signs
of life in "alien farts" on a Goldilocks water world 120 light-years
away.
-
- This exoplanet it found, “K2-18 b”, is a
sub-Neptune planet weighing in somewhere between the mass of Earth and Neptune
orbiting the habitable zone of a red dwarf star. After taking an atmospheric
spectrum, the JWST found it rich with hydrogen, methane and carbon
dioxide. These are all chemical markers
of a hydrogen-rich hycean world that is a prime contender for extraterrestrial
life.
-
- More tantalizing still was the detection of
dimethyl sulfide (DMS), a cabbage-smelling compound only known to be produced
by microscopic algae in Earth's oceans (alian farts). The researchers want to
take more peeks at “K2-18 b” and worlds like it to find further evidence for
extraterrestrial life beyond our planet.
-
- Stars and galaxies aren't evenly spread
throughout our universe. Instead, they're connected by an enormous cosmic web,
a gigantic network of crisscrossing celestial superhighways paved with hydrogen
gas and dark matter.
-
- Taking shape in the chaotic aftermath of the
Big Bang, the web's tendrils formed as clumps from the roiling broth of the
young universe; where multiple strands of the web intersected, and where
galaxies eventually formed.
-
- Insights into the structure of this web not
only give us a glimpse of the chaotic particle interactions that led to a
universe existing in the first place, so astronomers using the JWST were
stunned when they spotted the earliest strand of this web ever seen. It was a
gassy tendril made of of 10 closely packed galaxies spanning more than 3
million light-years in length.
-
- The filament formed when the universe was
just 830 million years old, and is partially wrapped around a bright black
hole.
-
- In the field of one of JWST's largest-area
surveys, “COSMOS-Web”, an Einstein ring was discovered around a compact,
distant galaxy. It turns out to be the most distant gravitational lens ever
discovered by a few billion light-years.
-
- The JWST's long list of cosmic distance
records this year include its discovery of the most distant gravitationally
lensed object ever seen an
"Einstein ring" produced by the warping of light from a distant
galaxy around a mysteriously dense foreground galaxy.
-
- This galaxy was a mind-bending 21 billion
light years away, which, given the universe's 13.8 billion years of age, means
that the light from the galaxy traveled almost twice that distance due to the
cosmos's expansion.
-
- This distantly-lensed light like this could
help astronomers to understand the puzzling nature of dark matter: the unseen
substance believed to make up 70% of the universe's matter.
-
- The donut-shaped “Ring Nebula”, also known
as Messier 57 (M57), is a 2,200 light-years distant corpse of an exploded star,
harboring at its center a tiny pinprick of a white dwarf that is the last
remaining piece of the star's core.
-
- As it reached the end of its life, the star
exploded outwards, hurling its innards far and wide to form what looks like a
gigantic eye. The explosion likely obliterated or ejected any unfortunate
planets in its way. This is a fate that
will similarly befall our own solar system in
5 billion years time. Noworries,
we won't be here.
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-
June 11, 2024 WEBB
TELESCOPE - new discoveries? 4497
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