The immense capacity of the James Webb space telescope (JWST) to see the confines of the observable universe also allows us to see how our universe was billions of years ago. Recall that, the finitude of the speed of light implies that what we see further in space is also further in time, which makes JWST a kind of time machine.
JADES-GS-Z13-1. The James Webb has detected again the light emitted by a very distant and therefore ancient galaxy. The telescope has captured the appearance of Jades-GS-Z13-1 as was 330 million years after big Bang. So old and distant is that its observation implies a new enigma: the enormous density of the universe in that era should prevent its observation billions of years later.
And light was made. The original universe was a dark place. If we go back enough, we will reach an era in which the universe was too dense for the light emanating from its particles to travel the space. The cosmos cooled as it expanded, so, when the photons had space to move around, there were no particles to issue them.
The thing changed when hydrogen atoms began to join to form the first stars and galaxies when the universe I was a few million years old. In this long process it is called reionization, a byloys in which hydrogen clouds were reactivated and emitted new light.
Even in this context, the universe was dense enough to part of the radiation of these first galaxies was overshadowed by a dense layer of neutral hydrogen. This is the case of Lyman-Alfa or Lyman-α.
Redshift 13. The team studied the luminous spectrum of the galaxy to estimate its red shift or Redshift. The expansion of the universe means that, in the long run, the frequency of the light emitted by this galaxy is reduced, that is, the universe, when expanding stretches the electromagnetic waves as if it were a magnet. This causes the visible light to store towards the red tones and to the infrared after long trips. The level at which the light comes “stretched”, its value Redshiftallows us to estimate the distance at which the galaxy is found that the broadcast.
The observations made from the JWST Nircam instrument allowed the team estimate value Redshift of 12.9 (either z= 12.9) For this galaxy, but to confirm this value, the team decided to study the complete spectrum through the Nirspec instrument (Near-Infrared Spectrgraph), also aboard the space telescope. It turned out that they were infrastiming their distance, which was closer to z= 13.
Lyman-α. However, the spectrum study caused the team to detect something strange in this galaxy, at a specific point of the spectrum, the Lyman-α radiation lamade, a type of electomagnetic emission associated with hydrogen atoms. The broadcast captured by James Webb’s instruments was much more intense than it should according to current cosmological models.
The details of the study have been published In an article In the magazine Nature.
Two possible explanations. In his article, the team speculate with possible explanations To this anomaly. The first involves the possibility that the stars of the galaxy, which would have been some of the earliest in the universe, would have created a “ionized gas bubble” around the galaxy.
This possibility would imply that the primal stars would have been “more massive, hotter and more luminous” than the stars formed in later stages of the universe. This possibility would give us new clues about the enigmatic population of stars known as Population III and that represents precisely these early stars of the universe.
The second possibility implies the existence of a supermassive black hole in the center of an active galactic nucleus.
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