Webb telescope makes discovery that was previously impossible

Astronomers get what they pay for.

Scientists have used the powerful $10 billion James Webb Space Telescope to peer into some of the deepest cosmos and have for the first time captured views of star clusters inside an extremely ancient galaxy. In the images below, you see these star clusters, which are gravitationally bound groupings of stars, as they existed just 460 million years after the creation of the universe. This represents 97 percent of cosmic time.

This view of deep space was made possible by the double whammy of the Webb telescope’s unprecedented sensitivity – its more than 21-foot-wide gold-plated mirrors detect extremely faint light sources – and a phenomenon natural called “gravitational lens”. In the foreground is a massive cluster of galaxies, each containing hundreds of billions of stars, millions of black holes, and perhaps billions of planets. The combined mass of these galaxies distorts space, like a bowling ball placed on a mattress. This creates a giant magnifying glass.

“Webb’s incredible sensitivity and angular resolution in near-infrared wavelengths, combined with the gravitational lensing provided by the massive galaxy cluster in the foreground, made this discovery possible,” said astrophysicist Larry Bradley. at the Space Telescope Science Institute which manages the Webb telescope, in a press release. statement.

“No other telescope could have made this discovery,” said Bradley, who led the new research published in the scientific journal. Natureadded.

The image below shows this unprecedented cosmic vision.

– On the right: Almost all of the objects in this image are entire galaxies (except for the six-pointed stars in the foreground). The white galaxies in the center make up the massive galaxy cluster SPT-CL J0615−5746, which creates gravitational lensing.

– On the left: Two lensed or magnified galaxies. The lower galaxy, nicknamed the “Arc of Cosmic Gems”, is depicted with a number of distinct star clusters. There are actually five, but gravitational lensing can sometimes, under the correct viewing alignment from our perch in space, create mirror images of objects.

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Astronomers use Webb to learn about the creation of the first stars and galaxies, revealing more about our cosmic history in the Milky Way. Additionally, astronomers suspect that these early galaxies – and massive star clusters within them that could eventually form even larger “globular star clusters” – emitted intense radiation in the early universe and ultimately destroyed dense clouds of gas that saturated space, rendering it largely opaque. Ultimately, this ended the “dark ages” of the universe. The bright starlight was no longer hidden; light was finally released, approximately 1 billion years after the creation of the universe.

Crushable speed of light

“No other telescope could have made this discovery.”

Today, with Webb’s help, we can see these important objects from primordial space.

“The surprise and amazement was incredible when we opened the Webb images for the first time,” marveled Angela Adamo, an astronomer at Stockholm University and also an author of the research, in a statement. “We saw a small string of bright dots, reflected from side to side – these cosmic gems are star clusters! Without Webb, we would not have known that we were looking at star clusters in a such a young galaxy!”

The powerful capabilities of the Webb telescope

The Webb telescope – a scientific collaboration between NASA, ESA and the Canadian Space Agency – is designed to peer into the deepest cosmos and reveal new information about the early universe. But it is also about observing the intriguing planets in our galaxy, as well as the planets and moons of our solar system.

Here’s how Webb achieves unprecedented feats, and will likely do so for decades:

– Giant mirror: Webb’s light-catching mirror measures more than 21 feet in diameter. This is more than two and a half times larger than the mirror of the Hubble Space Telescope. Capturing more light allows Webb to see older and more distant objects. As described above, the telescope observes 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 the very 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.

– Infrared view: Unlike Hubble, which largely observes light visible to us, Webb is primarily an infrared telescope, meaning it observes light in the infrared spectrum. This allows us to see much more of the universe. Infrared has longer wavelengths than visible light, so light waves glide through cosmic clouds more efficiently; light does not collide as often and is not scattered by these densely packed particles. Ultimately, Webb’s infrared vision can penetrate places Hubble cannot.

“This lifts the veil,” Creighton said.

– Observe distant exoplanets: The Webb telescope carries specialized equipment called spectrographs which will revolutionize our understanding of these distant worlds. The instruments can decipher which molecules (such as water, carbon dioxide and methane) exist in the atmospheres of distant exoplanets, whether gas giants or smaller rocky worlds. Webb will examine exoplanets in the Milky Way. Who knows what we will find?

“We might learn things we never thought about,” Mercedes López-Morales, an exoplanet researcher and astrophysicist at the Harvard and Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, told Mashable in 2021.

Astronomers have already discovered intriguing chemical reactions on a planet 700 light years away, and as described above, the observatory has begun studying one of the most anticipated places in the cosmos: rocky planets the size of the Earth of the TRAPPIST solar system. system.