Space and astronomy news
The NASA/European Space Agency (ESA)/Canadian Space Agency (CSA) James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) mission continues to dazzle and amaze with every image it beams back to Earth, and a recent observation depicting not one, not two, but three images of the same galaxy has been no different, as they proudly tweeted on February 28, 2023.
Continue reading “JWST Sees the Same Supernova Three Times in an Epic Gravitational Lens”
In the first data taken last summer with the Near Infrared Camera (NIRCam) on the new James Webb Space Telescope, astronomers found six galaxies from a time when the Universe was only 3% of its current age, just 500-700 million years after the Big Bang. While its incredible JWST saw these galaxies from so long ago, the data also pose a mystery.
These galaxies should be mere infants, but instead they resemble galaxies of today, containing 100 times more stellar mass than astronomers were expecting to see so soon after the beginning of the Universe. If confirmed, this finding calls into question the current thinking of galaxy formation and challenges most models of cosmology.
Continue reading ““The Universe Breakers”: Six Galaxies That are Too Big, Too Early”
The Milky Way Galaxy contains an estimated one hundred billion stars. Between these lies the Interstellar Medium (ISM), a region permeated by gas and dust grains. This dust is largely composed of heavier elements, including silicate minerals, ice, carbon, and iron compounds. This dust plays a key role in the evolution of galaxies, facilitating the gravitational collapse of gas clouds to form new stars. This galactic dust is measurable by how it attenuates starlight from distant galaxies, causing it to shift from ultraviolet to far-infrared radiation.
However, the origin of various dust grains is still a mystery, especially during the early Universe when heavier elements are thought to have been scarce. Previously, scientists believed that elements like carbon took hundreds of millions of years to form and could not have existed before about 2.5 billion years after the Big Bang. Using data obtained by the JWST Advanced Deep Extragalactic Survey (JADES), an international team of astronomers and astrophysicists report the detection of carbonaceous grains around a galaxy that existed roughly 1 billion years after the Big Bang.
Continue reading “Clouds of Carbon Dust Seen When the Universe was Less Than a Billion Years Old”
Astronomers have studied the star formation process for decades. As we get more and more capable telescopes, the intricate details of one of nature’s most fascinating processes become clearer. The earliest stages of star formation happen inside a dense veil of gas and dust that stymies our observations.
But the James Webb Space Telescope sees right through the veil in its images of nearby galaxies.
Continue reading “Galaxies Aren’t Just Stars. They’re Intricate Networks of Gas and Dust”
As the successor to the venerable Hubble Space Telescope, one of the main duties of the James Webb Space Telescope has been to take deep-field images of iconic cosmic objects and structures. The JWST’s next-generation instruments and improved resolution provide breathtakingly detailed images, allowing astronomers to learn more about the cosmos and the laws that govern it. The latest JWST deep-field is of a region of space known as Abell 7244 – aka. Pandora’s Cluster – where three galaxy clusters are in the process of coming together to form a megacluster.
Continue reading “Webb Sees Three Galaxy Clusters Coming Together to Form a Megacluster”
While astronomers and engineers were trying to calibrate one of the James Webb Space Telescope’s instruments last summer, they serendipitously found a previously unknown small 100–200-meter (300-600 ft) asteroid in the main asteroid belt. Originally, the astronomers deemed the calibrations as a failed attempt because of technical glitches. But they noticed the asteroid while going through their data from the Mid-InfraRed Instrument (MIRI), and ended up finding what is likely the smallest object observed to date by JWST. It is also one of the smallest objects ever detected in our Solar System’s main belt of asteroids.
“We — completely unexpectedly — detected a small asteroid in publicly available MIRI calibration observations,” explained Thomas Müller, an astronomer at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Germany, in a press release. “The measurements are some of the first MIRI measurements targeting the ecliptic plane and our work suggests that many, new objects will be detected with this instrument.”
Continue reading “JWST Unexpectedly Finds a Small Asteroid During ‘Failed’ Observations”
It is an exciting time for astronomers and cosmologists. Since the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), astronomers have been treated to the most vivid and detailed images of the Universe ever taken. Webb‘s powerful infrared imagers, spectrometers, and coronographs will allow for even more in the near future, including everything from surveys of the early Universe to direct imaging studies of exoplanets. Moreover, several next-generation telescopes will become operational in the coming years with 30-meter (~98.5 feet) primary mirrors, adaptive optics, spectrometers, and coronographs.
Even with these impressive instruments, astronomers and cosmologists look forward to an era when even more sophisticated and powerful telescopes are available. For example, Zachary Cordero
of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) recently proposed a telescope with a 100-meter (328-foot) primary mirror that would be autonomously constructed in space and bent into shape by electrostatic actuators. His proposal was one of several concepts selected this year by the NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) program for Phase I development.
Staring off into the ancient past with a $10 billion space telescope, hoping to find extraordinarily faint signals from the earliest galaxies, might seem like a forlorn task. But it’s only forlorn if we don’t find any. Now that the James Webb Space Telescope has found those signals, the exercise has moved from forlorn to hopeful.
But only if astronomers can confirm the signals.
Continue reading “Astronomers Pin Down the Age of the Most Distant Galaxy: Seen 367 Million Years After the Big Bang”
You’re looking at NGC 346, a star cluster 210 light years away that is energetically pumping out brand new stars from a dense cloud of gas and dust. Between 10 and 11 billion years ago, nearly all galaxies in the Universe underwent an era of intense star formation similar to what we see in NGC 346. This flurry of stellar birth is poetically nicknamed cosmic noon. Since then, star formation in the Universe has gradually dwindled, though it still blazes away in small pockets. By studying NGC 346 and other clusters like it, we can learn more about the era of cosmic noon and the evolution of galaxies.
To that end, researchers pointed the James Webb Space Telescope’s NIRCam infrared camera at NGC 346 last year, and they announced their preliminary findings at the American Astronomical Society’s annual meeting on January 11, 2023.
Continue reading “Cosmic Noon was Billions of Years ago, When Many Galaxies Were Filled With Star-Forming Nebulae Like This”
For the first time this week, photos from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) revealed that stellar bars were present in some galaxies as far back as 11 billion years ago. Stellar bars are a defining feature of about two-thirds of all spiral galaxies in the Universe, including our own Milky Way. The discovery has implications for astronomers’ understanding of galactic evolution, indicating that bars form very quickly and may persist for much of a galaxy’s lifespan, influencing its shape and structure.
Continue reading “New JWST Image Shows That Grand Spiral Galaxies had Already Formed 11 Billion Years ago”