Space telescope uncovers massive galaxies from cosmic dawn

Name: Space telescope uncovers massive galaxies from cosmic dawn
Uploaded: 23 Feb 2023, 12:14:21 PM
Duration: 01:03
Channel: TIMESOFINDIA.COM

41 views | Feb 23, 2023, 12:14:21 PM | AP

Astronomers may have found six massive galaxies thanks to the James Webb telescope. One of them is said to be 30 times smaller than the Milky Way and yet contain as many stars. These pixelated dots of light are likely to be galaxies, scientists reported on Wednesday. Astronomers have discovered what appear to be massive galaxies dating back to within 600 million years of the Big Bang, suggesting the early universe may have had a stellar fast track that produced big galaxies. While the James Webb Space Telescope has spotted even older galaxies, dating to within a mere 300 million years of the beginning of the universe, it’s the size and maturity of these six apparent mega-galaxies that stun scientists. Lead researcher Ivo Labbe of Australia’s Swinburne University of Technology and his team expected to find baby galaxies this close to the dawn of the universe. "It was kind of shocking because some of these galaxies were 13 billion light years away, and then it had 100 billion solar masses of stars. And so what that means is that we are viewing these galaxies very shortly after the Big Bang, only 600 million years after the Big Bang," he says. "I know it sounds like a lot, 600 million years, but our universe is 13.8 billion years old. So we're really looking at the infant universe when it was only 5% of its growing age." Each of the six objects looks to weigh billions of times more than our sun. In one of them, the total weight of all its stars may be 100 billion times greater than our sun, according to scientists. The findings, published in the journal Nature, indicate there may be a previously unknown channel of extremely fast and efficient galaxy formation, Labbe says. Labbe says he and his team didn’t think the results were real at first, that there couldn’t be galaxies as mature as our own so early in time. The objects were so big and bright that some team members thought they had made a mistake. "As opposed to the Milky Way, which is this grand design spiral galaxy like you have seen in pictures, with the beautiful spiral arms, this galaxy's 30 times smaller. So all those stars are jam-packed in a tiny area of space. It's like when you have a human, an adult that weighs 100 kilograms and they are just six centimeters tall. So all that mass is just packed into a tiny little human. And so they're weird. They're very strange creatures," Labbe explains. These galaxy observations were among the first data set that came from the $10 billion Webb telescope, launched just over a year ago. NASA and the European Space Agency’s Webb is considered the successor to the Hubble Space Telescope, coming up on the 33rd anniversary of its launch. Unlike Hubble, the bigger and more powerful Webb can peer through clouds of dust with its infrared vision and discover galaxies previously unseen. Unlike Hubble, the bigger and more powerful Webb can peer through clouds of dust with its infrared vision and discover galaxies previously unseen. Scientists hope to eventually observe the first stars and galaxies formed following the creation of the universe 13.8 billion years ago. Astronomers made the discovery while comparing images from Hubble and Webb. Webb features infrared technology, which was crucial here. The researchers still are awaiting official confirmation through sensitive spectroscopy, careful to call these candidate massive galaxies for now. Labbe says the discovery of even more galaxies is inevitable thanks to Webb. There could be even more massive, early galaxies out there awaiting discovery.