"The last few months have been exciting, but a huge amount remains in front of us to learn. "We can see that we're really on track to realizing the dream of understanding galaxies at the earliest times," says Illingworth. 'That's something that has been true for every. "It's exciting for us, from a theoretical standpoint, that maybe there are some open questions about how these galaxies could have formed their stars so much earlier that we're able to detect large numbers of them," says Jeyhan Kartaltepe of the Rochester Institute of Technology.įinding galaxies like these, and building a greater understanding of how the universe evolved to be what it is today, is why astronomers spent decades and $10 billion dollars to design and launch JWST. The images from the new telescope are 'really gorgeous,' said NASA's Jane Rigby, the operations project scientist for the James Webb Space Telescope. The planet’s discovery, based on ground-based observations. The planet orbits extremely close to its star (less than 1/20th the distance between Earth and the Sun) and completes one orbit in less than 3½ Earth-days. The two newly-seen galaxies are both much smaller that our home galaxy, the Milky Way, and one appears to be unexpectedly elongated.īecause so many early, bright galaxies have been seen by JWST, astronomers are having to rethink their old ideas about the evolution of the universe. WASP-96 b is a hot gas giant exoplanet that orbits a Sun-like star roughly 1,150 light-years away, in the constellation Phoenix. "There's certainly a lot of discussion going on." "We feel very confident about these two, but less confident about the others," says Illingworth. But those are more tentative observations. Since astronomers started using JWST, some have claimed to have spotted galaxies from even earlier times, like 250 million years after the Big Bang. On 12 July 2022, months of eager anticipation paid off, as NASA released the first full colour images of the cosmos captured by the James Webb Space Telescope. That latter discovery broke a record set by the Hubble Space Telescope in 2016, when it managed to glimpse a galaxy called GN-z11, which existed about 400 million years after the Big Bang.Īstronomer Garth Illingworth of the University of California, Santa Cruz was a member of the team that found GN-z11, and says that seeing it was "a huge surprise." But now, with the help of their new space telescope, scientists know it wasn't just a weird outlier - because they have at least two more examples. In research papers published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, Treu and other astronomers report the discovery of one galaxy that dates back to just 450 million years after the beginning, and another that dates back to 350 million years. "JWST has opened up a new frontier, bringing us closer to understanding how it all began." "Just a few hundred million years after the Big Bang, there are already lots of galaxies," says Tommaso Treu, an astronomer at the University of California at Los Angeles.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |