Space is very hot right now. The unmanned Artemis I mission is on its way to lunar orbit, the first in a series of missions that plan to return humans to the moon by the end of the decade. Spacewalk The International Space Station collapsed this week, and it was broadcast live. They shit on asteroids to prove that we can. And our new friend, the James Webb Space Telescope, is just doing its job, quietly revising our entire understanding of how the universe works.
JWST floats a million miles from Earth and returns images that make Hubble look like the real thing. Of course, the Web’s headline-grabbing images are the hallucinogens—images that are particularly beautiful, or large, that are impressive. The web always takes a lot of those. But these artistic images are, in a way, the PR telescope to justify their existence to the general public. The real science lies in analyzing the less exciting data: things that aren’t even in the visible spectrum, or in the careful analysis of relatively unspectacular images. Yesterday’s big news comes from these daily photos.
I realize I’m running the risk of underselling this, so: naturally These images are amazing, even if they are not the Pillars of Creation. And what they show, which is magnified in Figure 2 below center, is a superior brain-melting formula. This is the galaxy GLASS-z12, and it is believed to be 13.45 billion years old, just 350 million years after the creation of the universe in the Big Bang. This is the farthest starlight we’ve ever seen.
But it’s not the existence of a galaxy that excites scientists so much — we already knew there would be galaxies then, and we knew that superior images from the JWST would reveal them. What was unexpected was how easy it was to find.
“Based on all the predictions, we thought we had to search a much larger area to find such galaxies,” says Marco Castellano of the National Institute of Astrophysics in Rome, who directed a number of the research articles published Thursday in Astrophysical Journal Letters. Scientists had a model, based on current knowledge, of how many of those bright, fully formed galaxies in the early days of the universe would be out there. This model predicted that a piece of the sky about 10 times larger than what Webb captured would be needed to find it. Instead, Webb quickly wondered who are they These galaxies, which scientists discovered just days after the data for the study were released.
What this means is That our models were flawed and that bright, populated galaxies could have formed faster and more frequently after the end of the dark interstellar age—about 100 million years after the Big Bang, when conditions in the early universe finally allowed gravity to begin building stars—we never imagined.
We were wrong! so cold! You know we were wrong, like, the whole literal point of science! Knowing that our models and predictions were inaccurate allows us to create new models to better explain the observations, bringing us closer to being right. Science is frequent, and these small discoveries, rather than big, flashy pictures, are how JWST will help us write and rewrite the early history of our universe.
“These scenes just make your head explode,” says Paola Santini, co-author of Castellano et al. paper. “It’s a whole new chapter in astronomy. It’s like an archaeological dig, and all of a sudden you find a lost city or something you didn’t know you had. It’s amazing.
These two new and young galaxies are already making some interesting observations. And it is Much brighter than we expected, and brighter than anything closer to Earth. “Their extreme shine is a real headache,” said Pascal Ochs, co-author of the second article published today. But there is an interesting possibility. It is assumed that at the beginning of the Universe, stars consisted only of hydrogen and helium, simply because they had not yet had time to produce heavier elements by nuclear fusion. Dubbed Population III stars, these stars are said to be incredibly hot and incredibly bright, and although it has long been theorized, it has never been observed. Maybe yet.
This is, after all, hot shit. Thanks Web.
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