James Webb Space Telescope (1 Viewer)

[fred8615]

Mystery of the “Red Monsters”: Webb Finds Massive Early Galaxies That Shouldn’t Exist

Researchers using the James Webb Space Telescope have discovered three massive galaxies from the early universe, revealing them to be as massive as the Milky Way and forming stars with surprising efficiency. This finding, which contradicts earlier models of slow stellar formation, suggests that s

scitechdaily.com

 

[fred8615]

'Impossible' black holes discovered by the James Webb telescope may finally have an explanation

Peculiar James Webb Space Telescope observations seem to show gargantuan black holes in the earliest moments of the universe. New research may explain how they formed, thanks to primordial "seeds".

www.livescience.com

 

[Optimus Prime]

For the first time, researchers have used data from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) to uncover an example of a previously hypothetical phenomenon known as an "Einstein zig-zag" — where light from an object in the distant cosmos passes through two different regions of warped space-time. The newly confirmed effect, which was discovered among six identical copies of a luminous quasar, could shed light on an issue that is beginning to plague cosmology, experts say.

In 2018, astronomers discovered a quartet of identical bright points billions of light-years from Earth, later named J1721+8842. Initially, the scientists assumed that the four lights were mirror images of a single quasar — a luminous galactic core powered by a feeding black hole — that had been duplicated through a phenomenon known as "gravitational lensing."

Gravitational lensing happens when light from a distant object appears to get bent as it passes through warped space-time that has been pulled out of shape by the immense gravity of a lensing object — usually a massive galaxy or cluster of galaxies — located between the distant object and the observer. This warping effect can either duplicate the initial light source, as the light takes different routes around the lensing object, or stretch out the light into luminous halos, known as Einstein rings after Albert Einstein, who first predicted gravitational lensing with his theory of general relativity in 1915.

But in a 2022 study, researchers discovered that J1721+8842 had two additional points of light alongside the original quartet, as well as a faint red Einstein ring. The newly discovered points were slightly fainter than the other four points, which led researchers to suspect that the light show showed a pair of adjacent quasars, known as a binary quasar, that had been duplicated three times (rather than a single quasar that had been copied six times)...........

James Webb telescope uncovers 1st-ever 'Einstein zig-zag' hiding in plain sight — and it could help save cosmology

A new JWST study has revealed the true origins of a luminous quasar that has been duplicated six times as its light "zig-zags" through space-time via a phenomenon first predicted by Albert Einstein. The unusual light show could help tackle one of cosmology's biggest problems, experts claim.

www.livescience.com

 

[HoustonSaint68]

For the first time, researchers have used data from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) to uncover an example of a previously hypothetical phenomenon known as an "Einstein zig-zag" — where light from an object in the distant cosmos passes through two different regions of warped space-time. The newly confirmed effect, which was discovered among six identical copies of a luminous quasar, could shed light on an issue that is beginning to plague cosmology, experts say.

In 2018, astronomers discovered a quartet of identical bright points billions of light-years from Earth, later named J1721+8842. Initially, the scientists assumed that the four lights were mirror images of a single quasar — a luminous galactic core powered by a feeding black hole — that had been duplicated through a phenomenon known as "gravitational lensing."

Gravitational lensing happens when light from a distant object appears to get bent as it passes through warped space-time that has been pulled out of shape by the immense gravity of a lensing object — usually a massive galaxy or cluster of galaxies — located between the distant object and the observer. This warping effect can either duplicate the initial light source, as the light takes different routes around the lensing object, or stretch out the light into luminous halos, known as Einstein rings after Albert Einstein, who first predicted gravitational lensing with his theory of general relativity in 1915.

But in a 2022 study, researchers discovered that J1721+8842 had two additional points of light alongside the original quartet, as well as a faint red Einstein ring. The newly discovered points were slightly fainter than the other four points, which led researchers to suspect that the light show showed a pair of adjacent quasars, known as a binary quasar, that had been duplicated three times (rather than a single quasar that had been copied six times)...........

James Webb telescope uncovers 1st-ever 'Einstein zig-zag' hiding in plain sight — and it could help save cosmology

A new JWST study has revealed the true origins of a luminous quasar that has been duplicated six times as its light "zig-zags" through space-time via a phenomenon first predicted by Albert Einstein. The unusual light show could help tackle one of cosmology's biggest problems, experts claim.

www.livescience.com

This is like saying water is wet but, wow, sometimes you just have to marvel at how freaking brilliant and insightful Einstein was. I mean, it's like he was from a different species.

 

[Optimus Prime]

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has discovered a handful of possible galaxies that could be among the earliest to ever exist.

Located 13.6 billion light-years away and just 200 million years after the Big Bang, the five galaxy candidates are the earliest ever detected, and likely some of the first to have formed in the ancient universe.

If confirmed by follow-up observations, the ancient galaxies will offer astronomers a test of their best theories of galaxy formation along with unique insights into how matter first coalesced across the cosmos. The researchers published their findings Nov. 26 on the preprint database arXiv, so they have not yet been peer-reviewed.

"According to the standard paradigm of structure formation, the same primordial fluctuations that gave rise to hot and cold spots in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) will eventually grow, collapse, and form the first galaxies during cosmic dawn, ushering in the epoch of first light," the researchers wrote in their study.

"These first galaxies have remained outside of our observational reach for decades," they added. Yet the JWST has changed that.

Cosmologists previously estimated that the first clumps of stars began to merge and form galaxies just a few hundred million years after the Big Bang...........

James Webb Space Telescope smashes its own record to find the earliest galaxies that ever existed

The James Webb Space Telescope has spotted five galaxy candidates dating to just 200 million years after the Big Bang, making them the earliest ever detected. And there could be many more.

www.livescience.com

 

[Optimus Prime]

This month marks three years since the James Webb Space Telescope was first launched, which still feels something like a miracle given how many years of delays it took to finally get it orbiting our planet. The advanced technology onboard the spacecraft hasn't just sent back some pretty pictures, it's also challenged some of the basic tenets of cosmology, the study of some pretty big questions, including how the universe formed and how we got here.

For decades, the cosmological field was working under the assumption that, after the universe began in a hot dense soup of energy that expanded in the Big Bang, it continued to expand, forming the galaxies and stars that make up the universe. But in recent years, this understanding of how the universe expands has been put into question as two independent measurements to calculate this rate, which is called the Hubble constant, mysteriously diverged. In other words, we're trying to find out the speed limit of the expanding universe, but some measurements have given us different answers.

“The question arose: Is this a real discrepancy?” said Wendy Freedman, the leader of the Chicago Carnegie Hubble Program (CCHP). “Is this indicating new physics and demanding that we change our understanding of what we know as the standard model of cosmology — or were there still systematic uncertainties that made it seem like there was a tension?”

Over the past decade, scientists have been retracing their steps to try and understand whether a mathematical error was behind the conflicting numbers or whether this disparity meant the way cosmologists were imagining the model of the universe was in some way flawed. But time and again when researchers crunch the numbers, the tension persists.

Because the Hubble constant factors into what we know about the age of the universe, its size, and what it's made of, this divergence, known as the “Hubble tension,” has begun to unravel our fundamental and previously held assumptions about reality.

“There is nothing more exciting than having something not work out because it is pointing to the fact that you don’t understand something,” said Adam Frank, an astrophysics professor at the University of Rochester. “There is nothing more exciting than not understanding something.”..........

James Webb Space Telescope challenges cosmic theories: study

New research using clearer images from JWST are further complicating the so-called Hubble tension

www.salon.com

 

[Optimus Prime]

NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope just solved a conundrum by proving a controversial finding made with the agency’s Hubble Space Telescope more than 20 years ago.

In 2003, Hubble provided evidence of a massive planet around a very old star, almost as old as the universe. Such stars possess only small amounts of heavier elements that are the building blocks of planets.

This implied that some planet formation happened when our universe was very young, and those planets had time to form and grow big inside their primordial disks, even bigger than Jupiter. But how? This was puzzling.

To answer this question, researchers used Webb to study stars in a nearby galaxy that, much like the early universe, lacks large amounts of heavy elements. They found that not only do some stars there have planet-forming disks, but that those disks are longer-lived than those seen around young stars in our Milky Way galaxy.

“With Webb, we have a really strong confirmation of what we saw with Hubble, and we must rethink how we model planet formation and early evolution in the young universe,” said study leader Guido De Marchi of the European Space Research and Technology Centre in Noordwijk, Netherlands...............

NASA’s Webb Finds Planet-Forming Disks Lived Longer in Early Universe - NASA Science

NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope just solved a conundrum by proving a controversial finding made with the agency’s Hubble Space Telescope more than 20 years ago. In 2003, Hubble provided evidence of a massive planet around a very old star, almost as old as the universe. Such stars possess only...

science.nasa.gov

 

[Optimus Prime]

Astronomers setting their sights halfway across the observable universe recently identified the largest amount of individual stars ever detected so far away – a feat once considered near-impossible.

To make the historic discovery, the team of researchers turned to NASA's James Webb Space Telescope and its high-resolution power to reveal 44 individual stars in a galaxy so far away, that its light dates back to when the universe was half its age.

The discovery marks the largest number of individual stars ever detected in the distant universe. The team's findings, which were published Monday in the journal Nature, also unveil a method of investigating dark matter, which remains one of the universe's greatest mysteries, study co-author Fengwu Sun said.

"This groundbreaking discovery demonstrates, for the first time, that studying large numbers of individual stars in a distant galaxy is possible," Sun, of the Center for Astrophysics, a research institute jointly operated by the Harvard College Observatory and Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, said in a statement.

Most galaxies, including our Milky Way, contain tens of billions of stars that are readily observable. Even in nearby galaxies, such as Andromeda, which is about 2.5 million light-years away, astronomers can observe stars one by one.

But when astronomers look at distant galaxies billions of light-years away, individual stars can appear fuzzy – blended as their light travels great distances to reach us on Earth. For that reason, astronomers have long struggled to study how distant galaxies form and evolve.

"To us, galaxies that are very far away usually look like a diffuse, fuzzy blob," study lead author Yoshinobu Fudamoto, an astronomer at Chiba University in Japan, said in a statement. "But actually, those blobs consist of many, many individual stars."

Thanks to recent scientific advances, astronomers are only now getting better at observing those individual distant stars. Using a technique called gravitational lensing, the team of researchers was able to make their historic stellar discovery in a distant galaxy located nearly 6.5 billion light-years from Earth.

As first predicted by Albert Einstein, gravitational lensing occurs when a massive celestial body causes a sufficient curvature of spacetime for the path of light around it to be visibly bent, as if by a lens. The effect can amplify the light of distant stars, making it possible for instruments like the Webb telescope to detect them.............

In 'groundbreaking' study, astronomers detect record number of stars in distant galaxy

Astronomers used NASA's James Webb Space Telescope to reveal 44 stars in a galaxy so far away, its light dates to when the universe was half its age.

www.usatoday.com

 

[Optimus Prime]