The new images from the Webb Telescope aren’t just stunning — they’re record-breaking.
The most powerful space telescope ever built has peered into the ancient past.
That’s right. Using the James Webb Space Telescope, equipped with a giant mirror that can capture extremely faint light and the ability to observe light that can pass through huge clouds of cosmic gas (infrared), astronomers have discovered the oldest galaxy ever found (for now). This galaxy formed just 290 million years after the Big Bang, before our own galaxy was formed. Our universe is about 13.7 billion years old.
The fact that this extremely distant galaxy, named JADES-GS-z14-0, is available for human observation means that it is extremely bright. (The name comes from the JWST Advanced Deep Space Exploration (JADES) program, one of Webb’s many ongoing science missions.)
“This discovery is not just a new distance record for our team. The most important thing about JADES-GS-z14-0 is that at this distance, this galaxy is essentially very Astronomers Stefano Carniani of the École Normale Supérieure in Italy and Kevin Heinlein of the University of Arizona said: statement.
The galaxy was “shattered” Previous RecordThey added that it formed about 350 million years after the Big Bang.
A NASA scientist saw the first Voyager images, and he was horrified by what he saw.
The image below shows a deep view of space, almost entirely filled with galaxies, many of which are spirals like the Milky Way. The only other object besides a galaxy is a six-pointed bright dot that’s a foreground star. The record-breaking galaxy is that reddish blob beyond the much closer and sharper galaxy.
Galaxies are red because the universe has been constantly expanding for billions of years, causing its light to stretch like taffy. The longer the wavelength of light, the redder it is. (By contrast, blue wavelengths are the much shorter wavelengths in the visible light spectrum.)
The enlarged box shows the oldest galaxy ever discovered, JADES-GS-z14-0.
Credits: NASA / ESA / CSA / STSc / B. Robertson (University of California, Santa Cruz) / B. Johnson (CfA) / S. Tacchella (University of Cambridge) / P. Cargile (CfA)
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The scientists used a highly specialized instrument called the Webb Telescope’s Near-Infrared Spectrograph. NIR Specsto determine the age of this distant galaxy. A spectrometer acts like a prism, separating light into its different colors and parts, ultimately allowing astronomers to analyze the physical properties and composition of the object they are observing, such as a galaxy or planet. In this case, the researchers looked for specific patterns in light caused by extreme redshifts, allowing them to ascertain the age of the light and therefore the age of such galaxies.
JADES-GS-z14-0 is unexpectedly bright despite being more than 13 billion light years away (a light year is about 6 trillion miles), which has astronomers asking big questions going back to ancient times: What is its origin?
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“This amount of starlight suggests that the galaxy is hundreds of millions of times more massive than our Sun!” the researchers wrote. “This raises the question of how nature could have created such a luminous, massive and large galaxy in less than 300 million years.”
The Webb Telescope’s Powerful Capabilities
The Webb Telescope is a scientific collaboration between NASA, ESA and the Canadian Space Agency, designed to peer into the deepest depths of space and reveal new insights into the early universe. But it’s not just the planets and moons of our solar system, it’s also observing intriguing planets in our galaxy.
Here’s an outline of how Webb achieved this unique feat, and will likely continue to do so for decades to come.
– Giant Mirror: Webb’s light-capturing mirror is more than 21 feet in diameter, more than 2.5 times larger than the Hubble Space Telescope’s mirror. Capturing more light allows Webb to see more distant and ancient objects. As mentioned above, the telescope peers into stars and galaxies that formed more than 13 billion years ago, just a few hundred million years after the Big Bang.
“We’re going to see stars and galaxies forming for the first time in history,” Gene Clayton, an astronomer and director of the Manfred Olson Planetarium at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, told Mashable in 2021.
– Infrared view: While the Hubble Telescope primarily sees light that is visible to our eyes, the Webb Telescope is primarily an infrared telescope, meaning that it sees light in the infrared spectrum, which allows it to see a much larger range of the universe. wavelength With a shorter wavelength than visible light, light waves can pass through the cosmic clouds more efficiently and the light is less likely to collide with and be scattered by these densely packed particles. Ultimately, Webb’s infrared vision can reach places Hubble cannot.
“It lifts the veil,” Clayton said.
– Peeking into distant exoplanets: As mentioned above, the Webb Telescope It is equipped with a special instrument called a spectrometer. This probe will revolutionize our understanding of these far-flung worlds. The instrument will be able to decipher what molecules (such as water, carbon dioxide, and methane) are present in the atmospheres of far-flung exoplanets, including gas giants and small rocky planets. Webb will observe exoplanets in our Milky Way galaxy. Who knows what we’ll find?
“We may learn things we’ve never thought about before,” says exoplanet researcher and astrophysicist Mercedes Lopez Morales. Harvard University-Smithsonian Center for AstrophysicsHe told Mashable in 2021.
Astronomers have already managed to discover intriguing chemical reactions on a planet 700 light-years away, and as mentioned above, the observatory has begun observing one of the most promising places in the universe: a rocky, Earth-sized planet in the TRAPPIST solar system.
