the James Webb Space Telescope I just looked back in time 13.4 billion years. You read that right.
Doing so has allowed scientists to find the oldest galaxies humanity has ever seen (so far). These galaxies, which contain countless stars, were created shortly after the birth of the universe.
“For the first time, we detected galaxies only 350 million years after the Big Bang, and we can be quite confident of their remarkable distances,” said Brant Robertson, an astrophysicist at the University of California Santa Cruz who worked on the research, he said in a statement(Opens in a new tab). “Finding these early galaxies in such stunningly beautiful images is a special experience.”
The Webb telescope has found massive objects that should not exist in deep space
To capture the extremely faint light from these galaxies, the astronomy team trained the Webb telescope—the most powerful space observatory ever built—on a relatively small patch of sky. But they searched for many hours, and got a lot of details. “An image is only the size a human would appear when viewed from a mile away.” european space agency,(Opens in a new tab) He explained who runs the telescope with NASA and the Canadian Space Agency. “However, it is teeming with approximately 100,000 galaxies, each of which was discovered at some point in its history, billions of years in the past.”
“Finding these early galaxies in such stunningly beautiful images is a special experience.”
In the image below, there are four galaxies that represent the faintest light ever captured by astronomers. They are fuzzy points – not massive spiral galaxies – because of their deep distance. And most importantly, it is reddish. This is because the universe is expanding, so this ancient light is expanding, and longer wavelengths of light appear red (this is called a “redshift”(Opens in a new tab)).
Four of the oldest galaxies ever recorded have been confirmed. They are less than 400 million years old.
Credit: NASA/ESA/CSA/M. Zamani (ESA/Webb)/Leah Hustak (STScI)/Brant Robertson (UC Santa Cruz)/S. Tacchella (Cambridge), E. Curtis-Lake (UOH), S. Carniani (Scuola Normale Superiore), JADES collaboration
The scientists used a highly specialized instrument on the Webb telescope, called the Near Infrared Spectrometer, or NIRSpec(Opens in a new tab)To determine the age of these distant objects. The spectrometer works a bit like a prism, separating the light into different colors or parts, ultimately allowing astronomers to dissect the physical properties and composition of the object they’re viewing, such as a galaxy or planet. In this case, the researchers looked for specific patterns in the light caused by extreme redshifts, which allowed them to confirm the age of light — and, by extension, the age of galaxies.
“These are by far the weakest infrared spectra ever captured,” astronomer Stefano Carniani of Scuola Normale Superiore in Italy, who also worked on the research, said in a statement.
This faint-of-light discovery is not just a scientific achievement. It’s confirmation that about 13.4 billion years ago, millions of stars appeared, which would help manufacture the elements needed to eventually form the first planets.(Opens in a new tab)Light up the universe.
You can expect more unprecedented perspectives, and insight, into the universe. JWST’s Deep Advanced Extragalactic Survey, or JADES, Webb’s project peering into the early universe, will spend hundreds of hours searching deep space in 2023.
Webb telescope’s powerful capabilities
The Webb telescope is designed to delve deeper into the universe and reveal unprecedented insights into the early universe. But it also has its eye on the interesting planets in our galaxy, and even planets in our solar system.
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Here’s how Webb achieves things like no other, and will likely do for decades:
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Giant mirror: Webb’s mirror, which captures the light, is more than 21 feet across. This is two and a half times larger than the mirror of the Hubble Space Telescope. Capturing more light allows Webb to see more ancient, distant objects. As shown above, the telescope is staring at stars and galaxies that formed more than 13 billion years ago, just a few hundred million years after the Big Bang.
“We will see the first stars and galaxies ever formed,” Jean Creighton, astronomer and director of the Manfred Olson Planetarium at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, told Mashable in 2021.
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infrared view: Unlike Hubble, which largely sees light visible to us, Webb is primarily an infrared telescope, meaning it sees light in the infrared spectrum. This allows us to see more of the universe. Infrared has longer wavelengths(Opens in a new tab) of visible light, so the light waves slip more efficiently through cosmic clouds; Light does not often collide with these dense particles and is scattered. Ultimately, Webb’s infrared vision can penetrate places that Hubble cannot.
“It lifts the veil,” Creighton said.
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Staring at distant exoplanets: Webb Telescope He carries specialized equipment called a spectrophotometer(Opens in a new tab) It would revolutionize our understanding of these distant worlds. The instruments can decipher molecules (such as water, carbon dioxide and methane) present in the atmospheres of distant exoplanets – whether they are gas giants or smaller, rocky worlds. Webb will be looking at exoplanets in the Milky Way. Who knows what we’ll find.
“We may learn things we never thought about,” said Mercedes Lopez-Morales, an exoplanet researcher and astrophysicist at the Astrophysics Center at Harvard University and the Smithsonian.(Opens in a new tab)for Mashable in 2021.
Astronomers have already managed to find interesting chemical reactions on a planet 700 light-years away, and the observatory has begun searching for one of the most anticipated places in the universe: the Earth-sized rocky planets in the TRAPPIST solar system.