5 Incredible Things We've Already Discovered thanks to the James Webb Telescope

The James Web Space Telescope or JWST left Earth for orbit on Christmas 2021 after months of positioning itself in a stable orbit and carefully aligning all components. The first image of the

telescope

was released to the public on July 11, 2022, and it officially entered service. the next day it's been less than 2 years since then, but jwst has proven to be a powerhouse of

incredible

discoveries, from never-before-seen objects within our own solar system to distant galaxies that threaten to shatter our understanding of the universe. be looking at five of the amazing

things

we've

already

discovered

thanks

to jwst in july 2022 the first images came from jwst and immediately received a lot of attention these were the highest resolution images of distant galaxies ever seen and it was hard not to be amazed by the stark contrast between these new images and those from previous

telescope

s like Hubble;

However, about a week after those images appeared, researchers noticed something peculiar about one of them: the image showed a red dot that was suspiciously bright. It wasn't unusual for a galaxy to be so red or so bright, but it shouldn't be. have been at the same time. The reddening is the result of something called redshift, which is caused by the expansion of the universe as the universe expands outward. stretched making it appear redder to us, this color can be used to determine the distance of the light source from us and, by extension, its age, just like redshift, it can tell us the age of galaxies, their brightness It is used to indicate its size.

As a general rule, the brighter a galaxy appears, the more stars it has, and these galaxies were large, comparable in size to our own Milky Way, according to researcher IA L. I ran the analysis software on the little brick and it spit out two numbers at a time. distance of 13.1 billion. light years of mass 100 billion stars and I almost spit out my coffee according to the standard model of cosmology this should have been completely impossible and the next day six more impossible galaxies were found researchers began referring to them as Universe Breakers because they threatened to destroy our complete understanding of the formation of the universe since then even more impossible galaxies have been

discovered

, these galaxies are extremely old and originated only a few hundred million years after the origin of the universe, now that on its own is totally fine, as We know, galaxies

already

existed.

They formed so early, but they shouldn't have been as big as they are. Our understanding of the evolution of galaxies is that they started out small and then these small dwarf galaxies combined to form larger galaxies. According to currently accepted theories, this process would not have occurred. It even started up to one or two billion years after the Big Bang, hundreds of millions of years after the newly observed galaxies were already fully mature. Not only does this timeline make no sense according to the current model, but there should not have been enough gas available to form all these stars according to L to produce these galaxies so quickly that it almost takes all the gas in the universe to become stars. with close to 100% efficiency and that is very difficult, which is the scientific term for impossible, although scientists have yet to do it. reach a consensus a couple of theories have been put forward to try to explain how these objects could have come to exist one theory is that they might not be massive galaxies at all but rather quazars a quazar is a galactic nucleus powered by a supermassive black hole The most powerful quazars are thousands of times brighter than the Milky Way, so it's possible that a quazar that was the right size for the early stage it formed in the universe could be bright enough to look like a massive galaxy to us. .

The other possibility is a phenomenon. It's known as burst star formation, in which groups of stars suddenly come to life in a sudden burst rather than through the slow, gradual process by which most stars are normally born. These rapid bursts of star birth are a phenomenon that has been observed in several places around. the universe with the first observations going back years before the jwst was released, so this is not just a technically possible theory that was created to force new data to fit into our current cosmological model, of course, that It still doesn't fully answer the question.

The question of how these galaxies could be so massive even if stars formed at a much faster rate, their calculated mass should not yet be possible. The key is that while a galaxy's brightness has a strong correlation with its mass, it is not completely causal, according to researcher Claude. Andre fer gier most of the light in a galaxy comes from the most massive stars because the most massive stars burn at a faster rate, have a shorter life, so the brightness of a galaxy is more directly related to the amount of stars that have formed in the last few million years than the mass of the galaxy as a whole, taking that into account, if the impossible galaxies experienced explosive star formation of massive stars, the galaxy could have shone much brighter than it is known. would expect in relation to its mass, it is not just a discovery. of massive early galaxies that have called into question our understanding of cosmology, but the discovery of the first supermassive black holes also in April 2023 jwsd discovered Sear 1019, the oldest known black hole in the universe at that time and approximately 10 million times the mass. of our sun, this black hole was much smaller than other supermassive black holes in the early Universe;

However, it was also much older, dating back to about 570 million years after the Big Bang. Although it may be small compared to other black holes that may contain billions of times the mass of our sun, it was still much older. larger than anything that should have existed so early in the universe and it wasn't just a few months after the discovery of SE 1019, jwsd discovered another black hole at the center of the galaxy gnz11 was even smaller, just 1.6 million times the mass of our sun, but it was also even older. The oldest known new black hole in the universe dates back to 400 million years after the big bang in the case of both blacks. holes that should not have had enough time to accumulate that amount of mass according to the traditional model.

Black holes are remnants of massive stars that burned up, died, and then collapsed in on themselves, then accumulate matter around them and grow in size. Getting so much mass in such a short time should not have been possible and has led to some new theories about how these black holes came to be. One is that all that stellar nonsense was completely ignored and the matter collapsed directly into a black hole: this would require an

incredible

amount of matter accumulated in an early galaxy to collapse into the black hole, much more matter than would be likely, but However unlikely it may be, it is not necessarily impossible, it would also be the fastest way to create a black hole.

Therefore, it provides enough time to have accumulated so much total mass in such a short time. Another theory requires the existence of a population of three stars. They were first theorized in the 1960s that they existed in the early universe and some indirect evidence suggests that in fact they may have existed, but there is no direct evidence or observation to support that idea, but these stars would have been composed entirely of hydrogen and helium, completely devoid of heavier elements. Such a star could burn quickly, explode, and then leave behind a black hole that may have rapidly gained mass, sometimes at a faster than stable rate.

This is now considered the most likely of these theories, especially since there was already indirect evidence hinting at the existence of a three-star population. The final theory is that these newly discovered black holes could have started out as Primordial Black Holes Primordial black holes are comparatively small objects that are theorized to have existed immediately after the Big Bang. In some theories, these black holes even predate the Big Bang. If that turned out to be the correct theory, it would certainly raise more questions than it answers. but it would have given these early black holes enough time to accumulate the large masses observed by ground-based jwst telescopes, it had hinted at the existence of something unusual floating in the Orion Nebula for years and the jwst was finally able to see it in 2023, which the researchers discovered was more than a little surprising, as it once again threatened to call into question everything we thought we knew about the formation of stars and other solar systems.

Jwst identified 40 pairs of Jupiter-mass binary objects, also known as jumbos despite having Jupiter in the name. just to state that size instead of stating that these objects are planets after all, you're probably a Great Dane mass object, but you're not a Great Dane, you're probably a human similarly, despite having a comparable mass to that of Jupiter, the jumbo jets do not appear. For planets or stars, they seem to be something completely new. Somewhere in between the two, these binary pairs of objects appear to be floating freely throughout the Irion Nebula, without actually orbiting anything, raising questions not only about what they are, but also about what they are.

Also where the hell did they come from. According to gas physics, an object as small as Jupiter should not be able to form on its own; It certainly can form as part of a solar system, but physics states that jumbo jets could not have formed from gas clouds. Regardless of the formation of other celestial bodies, if they were created through a mechanism similar to star formation, there are clearly some elements missing that we have yet to identify and that explain how something so small could have come to exist, but what What if these objects were created through star formation?

The same process that creates planets for many of the jumbo jets would be fine, since hundreds of them have been discovered in the Orion Nebula. However, it's those 40 binary pairs that make this a less satisfactory solution: individual planets are kicked out of solar systems from time to time and there are many rogue planets wandering around the galaxies, this is generally a very chaotic process. , so it is unlikely that two planets would be ejected from a solar system at the same time, even if that happened, how would those two planets be ejected in such a way that through all the chaos they managed to remain St the for each other as a binary pair.

It's the kind of thing that probably isn't impossible, but is extremely unlikely. It's certainly not something we should expect to discover happened 40 times in one small area of ​​the universe. all in a very small period of time, so far we do not have good answers to the questions raised by the discovery of jumbo jets, since we cannot even determine if they are closer to stars or planets, they may end up representing a completely new category of celestial bodies, the only thing we know for sure is that this Discovery means that there is much more about the formation of stars and solar systems that we have left to learn when we think about discoveries from the beginning that we tend to think about celestial bodies. the most distant reaches of the universe, yet the telescope has demonstrated its ability to make incredible new discoveries also within our own solar system, albeit completely by accident, beginning with the calibration of JW or Mir's mid-infrared instrument, the telescope He pointed towards the main one. asteroid belt that lies between Mars and Jupiter with the goal of testing some of Mary's filters, but the calibration team initially considered these tests a failure.

The images were focused on asteroid 10920, but the asteroid was too bright to make the necessary calibrations. Rather than simply dismiss this exercise as a waste of time, the team decided to use Mary's data to establish and test a new method for calculating the orbit and size of an object. It was while doing those calculations on asteroid 10920 that the team noticed the images. taken by Mir revealed the presence of a never-before-seen asteroid in the telescope's field of view; in particular, that asteroid was very small and was estimated to be only 100 to 200 M long or approximately the size of the Washington Monument.

This was the smallest object observed by jwst and there is much more to the discovery than just a small floating rock. The main asteroid belt contains remnants of the formation of the solar system, allowing it to act almost as a fossil record ofour solar systems. Evolution More than 100,000 asteroids have been found within the belt so far and our current models predict the existence of many small asteroids, some barely larger than a person. Much could be learned about the birth of our solar system by examining these objects, but small asteroids have not been studied as much as larger ones.

Their counterparts for one simple reason are really difficult to see. Based on this accidental discovery, it is believed that jwst will continue to make serendipitous discoveries of previously unknown asteroids within our solar system, unfortunately, although we know that these discoveries could have enormous implications for our understanding of the solar system exactly what those implications are are still unknown at this time. The future JWSD will make dedicated observations to study asteroids less than 1 kilometer in size, so I'll have to wait and see what is learned when researchers deliberately study these objects instead of just accidentally noticing their existence back in 2015 with the Kepler space telescope. discovered exoplanet k218b the planet orbits the red dwarf star k218 in the Leo constellation just 124 light years away this has become one of the most important exoplanets, especially after a 2019 spectroscopic analysis that showed the presence of water vapor in the atmosphere was the first time water vapor was seen in the atmosphere of an exoplanet that was not a hot Jupiter, the informal name for gas giant planets that have high surface temperatures due to their proximity to the stars they orbit. k218b orbits place within the planet's habitable zone and has an average temperature of only about 20° Ccolder than Earth.

It is still unknown if it is a rocky planet like Earth but it has a hydrogen-rich atmosphere and is believed to It is covered by an ocean of liquid water. K218b has been considered so important that a new category of planets has been created called planet Hean. It has been defined by its own characteristics despite having been intensively studied. In 2023, the JWSD was able to make a new discovery. and potentially groundbreaking regarding k218b, although it was a mix of good news and bad news, the bad news was that the atmosphere was shown to be composed of only 0.1% water vapor, this does not rule out the possibility that there large amounts of water on the planet, as it is possible that the jwsd spectrographic image was only of the dry stratosphere on Earth, our troposphere is 0.3 to 0.4% water vapor, while the stratosphere only contains a few water molecules per million air molecules, however it was the other gases discovered that were much more interesting, there was a lot of hydrogen that we already knew about and the presence of carbon dioxide and methane we did not.

Particularly unusual, however, jwst also detected the presence of dimethyl sulfide or DMS, this particular compound is extremely important because here on Earth it is a biosignature anyway, all DMS on Earth is created by the life and most of it is created by phytoplankton which does not This means that this has to be the case on all planets and there could be some unknown mechanism causing its existence on k218b and it certainly warrants more research before jumping to conclusions, anyway Additional research would be needed as the initial jwsd results are not completely conclusive that the proportion of DMS in the atmosphere was very low, so additional testing is required to confirm the results.

At the time of writing, follow-up research should have already been performed using the JWSS Mir spectrograph, but the findings from that mission have not yet been published. Of course, it's worth noting that even if k8b is capable of potentially supporting microbial life, it's not a candidate Earth, that's also a big deal since we don't even know if the planet has a surface you can stand on and it's It was widely believed that life could not form on a gaseous planet and that is just one of many potential unknowns that could prevent life from being a possibility on this planet, but the jwsd report on the presence of DMS on the The planet's atmosphere remains an incredibly exciting development.

It's too early to make bold claims about the existence of microbial life on the planet, but early evidence suggests there's a very real chance we may not be able to discover it yet.