Researchers at Texas A&M University have used the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's (NASA)n James Webb telescope to discover smoke and smog particles in a galaxy that is a whopping 12 billion light years away from Earth. Officially described as 'organic particles', the discovery allows astronomers to take a peek at a time when the universe was in its earliest stages of formation. It was published in Nature Journal earlier this month and is one of the first of its kind of discovery made by the Webb telescope that has awed both astronomers and the general public with its crisp images of galaxies.
James Webb's Discovery Enables Astronomers To See Star Formation Close To The Beginning of Time
The James Webb telescope was launched in December 2021 and started operating roughly six months later, in June 2022. Its first set of images came a month later as part of a test of the telescope's four primary scientific instruments. These instruments are a near-infrared camera, a near-infrared spectrograph, a mid-infrared instrument and a group of sensors and spectrographs.
At the same time, not only can the telescope capture crisper images, but it can also compute them much faster than its predecessors - a crucial feature for a tool designed to capture hundreds of gigabytes of imaging data.
Now, it has enabled astronomers at Texas A&M University to see the early stages of the universe's formation. The universe is roughly 13.7 billion years old and the images capture smoke and smog from a stunning 12 billion light years away from Earth. For lack of better wording, this is nothing short of a look at the past since the galaxies visible in the image will be in a different form today if they exist. Whether they do in 2023, will be unknown for another 12 billion years.
Crucially, the smog, which is viable in high definition by astronomy standards, has also enabled astronomers to develop a deeper understanding of how the universe works. Conventionally held beliefs indicate that smoke and smog. generally indicates the birth of new stars.
However, the astronomer leading Texas A&M's latest discovery, Justin Spilker, shares that this might not be the case since his team was able to find a lot of regions where there was smoke but little to no new star formation.
Additionally, the fact that Webb can look back billions of years into the past also allows astronomers to understand the earliest phases of the universe's formation. According to Spilker:
Detecting smoke in a galaxy early in the history of the universe? Webb makes this look easy. Now that we’ve shown this is possible for the first time, we’re looking forward to trying to understand whether it’s really true that where there’s smoke, there’s fire. Maybe we’ll even be able to find galaxies that are so young that complex molecules like these haven’t had time to form in the vacuum of space yet, so galaxies are all fire and no smoke. The only way to know for sure is to look at more galaxies, hopefully even further away than this one.
He and his team also got lucky this time since the galaxy's light was amplified due to an Einstein ring. This phenomenon happens when two galaxies are aligned, and the light from the galaxy at the back is amplified by the gravity of the galaxy in the front. This allows the observer to take a much more detailed look than would have been possible otherwise.
Refference- https://wccftech.com
0 Comments