- 4557 - WEBB - telescope finds early galaxies? - James Webb telescope confirms the earliest galaxy in the universe is bursting with way more stars than we thought possible. The light from the most distant galaxy in the known universe suggests that there's something off about our current cosmological models.
------------------------ 4557
- WEBB - telescope finds early galaxies?
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- The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has
spotted the earliest galaxy ever seen, and its unusually bright light is coming
from a bizarre frenzy of star formation.
Galaxy named “JADES-GS-z14-0”, the galaxy formed at least 290 million
years after the Big Bang, and contains stars that have been bursting into life
since an estimated 200 million years after our universe began.
-
- Spotted by JWST's Near InfraRed Spectrograph
(NIRSpec) instrument, the mysterious origins and rapid development of the stars
has opened up some fundamental questions about how our universe came to be.
-
- The discovery by JWST of an abundance of
luminous galaxies in the very early Universe suggests that galaxies developed
rapidly, in apparent tension with many standard models. Galaxy formation models
will now need to address the existence
of such large and luminous galaxies so early in cosmic history.
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- Astronomers aren't certain when the very
first globules of stars began to clump into the galaxies we see today, but
cosmologists previously estimated that the process began slowly within the
first few hundred million years after the Big Bang.
-
- Current theories suggest that halos of dark
matter (a mysterious and invisible substance believed to make up 85% of the
total matter in the universe) combined with gas to form the first seedlings of
galaxies. One billion to 2 billion years into the universe's life, these early
protogalaxies reached adolescence, forming into dwarf galaxies that began
devouring one another to grow into ones like our own.
-
- But discoveries made by the JWST confounded
this view. In February 2023, a group of astronomers analyzing data from the
telescope discovered a group of six gargantuan galaxies — aged between 500 to
700 million years after the Big Bang — that were so massive they were in
tension with 99% of cosmological models.
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- The light from JADES-GS-z14-0 is similarly
puzzling. The light detected by NIRSpec
finds its origins in an enormous halo of young stars surrounding the galaxy's
core, which have been burning for at least 90 million years before the point of
its observation. The galaxy is also crammed with unusually high quantities of
dust and oxygen, which suggests its history of star birth and death may be even
longer.
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- This finding shows that ultra-bright
galaxies in the early universe are not just the product of active black holes
greedily gobbling up matter, as is often assumed to be the case. The new
observations show that runaway star formation is also a viable explanation for
the surprising brightness of these ancient galaxies.
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- So how did galaxies like JADES-GS-z14-0
produce so many stars, so quickly? Answers to this cosmic mystery remain
elusive, but it's unlikely they will break our current understanding of
cosmology. Instead, astronomers are toying with explanations that include the
earlier-than-anticipated appearance of giant black holes; supernova feedback;
or even dark energy to understand why these ancient stars were able to form so
rapidly.
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-
September 17, 2024 WEBB
- telescope finds early galaxies? 4557
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--------------------- --- Wednesday, September
18, 2024
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