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This picture of a galaxy from the early universe is hardly what we would call dazzling.
You are looking at a very hazy and dust-covered inhabitant of the universe, whose name is just a string of numbers and letters. So he sits quite a distance from Land It slips in and out of the watchful eyes of various telescopes. The image, taken by the powerful James Webb Space Telescope, highlights the galaxy AzTECC71 – but what’s striking here is that we see AzTECC71 the way it looked just 900 million years after the Big Bang. That’s when Universe It was turned on for the first time starsAbsolute Eons Before we have The solar system was born.
the James Webb Space TelescopeSeeing this galaxy as a blurry speck of light is a far cry from other eyes Glorious images of galaxies and galaxy groups in its repertoire. However, even this smudge holds important lessons for our understanding of the early universe.
“The fact that even something so extreme can barely be seen in the most sensitive imaging from our newest telescope is very exciting to me,” said study author Jed McKinney of the University of Texas at Austin. statement. “It would probably tell us that there was a whole bunch of galaxies that were hiding from us.”
Related: The James Webb Space Telescope finds two of the most distant galaxies ever seen
Scientists say this could mean the early universe was dustier than previously thought, shedding more light on how it has evolved since the Big Bang roughly 13.8 billion years ago.
AzTECC71 was first observed as an inexplicable bubble of light by the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope in Hawaii. Later, it was also seen by the ALMA radio telescope in Chile. However, it seemed to disappear in the images captured by the camera Hubble Space Telescope.
“This thing is a real beast,” McKinney said. “Although it looks like a small bubble, it actually forms hundreds of new stars every year.”
As part of an international effort to map the universe’s earliest structures (in a patch of sky the size of three full moons as seen from Earth), McKinney and his colleagues searched for the galaxy in data collected by the James Webb Space Telescope. This observatory’s unprecedentedly powerful infrared eye is able to peer into the dense dust clouds prevalent in the early universe.
Before the James Webb Space Telescope, these galaxies were impossible to find. Light from newborn stars, found deep within dust-covered galaxies, is absorbed at optical wavelengths by the dust itself, and then re-emitted at fainter, longer wavelengths that can be picked up by the James Webb Space Telescope. One in five such galaxies has remained invisible to Hubble, forming a group of what astronomers call “Hubble dark galaxies.”
“This means that our understanding of the evolutionary history of galaxies is biased because we only see unobscured, less dusty galaxies,” McKinney said.
In the near future, McKinney and his team plan to uncover more faint and hidden galaxies using data from the James Webb Space Telescope, which can not only “peer into the furthest reaches of the universe, but can also penetrate the thickest veils of dust.”
This research is described in A paper Published in October in the Astrophysical Journal.
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