What Did James Webb Really See At The Beginning Of Time?

On Christmas morning 2021, a powerful rocket came to life, racing away from the ground, rising into the cloud-laden sky, and heading into the darkness of deep space. Its objective was 1.5 million kilometers from Earth, in a place where the gravities of the Sun and our planet combine in a very particular way in this place known as a range point, the payload would remain in space fixed in relation to the Earth as it rotates around the sun. Once in place, this payload began its delicate deployment. Huge sheets were deployed to protect it from the sun. The Sun glowed as the hexagonal mirror segments unfolded and clicked into place, then waited until it cooled to the frigid depths of space.

After several months, the device was ready for operation, the latest in a long series of technological leaps. A signal was sent from Earth. for this most recent Observer to wake up to open its eyes and appear in the darkness after 30 years and 10 billion the James Webb Space Telescope had finally arrived. James Webb has a 6 and 1/2 M mirror and cameras tuned to see in The infrared's mission is to map the life of young stars in our own Milky Way and search for life on planets orbiting other suns, but it was his view of the early universe that caused the first controversy: the power of James Web sitting far from the glow of the earth is its ability to look back in

time

its sensitive instruments can discern the light that has traveled for more than 10 billion years emitted by the first star in the first incipient galaxies through the eyes of the network we can witness the birth of the universe, of course, astronomers had expectations about

what

the network should see in the infant Cosmos during the 20th century.

They had realized that galaxies, including our own Milky Way, had grown over

time

. They start out as small groups of stars, but through collisions and mergers, small galaxies grow until they end. Billion-year-old galaxies with hundreds of billions of stars appear in the cosmos, but when astronomers analyzed the new James Web images, something didn't seem right as they looked at the time of the first stars, they didn't expect anything. more than small specks, but instead They saw something unexpected: large, well-formed galaxies peeking out of the darkness, objects that made no sense, since since the

beginning

of the 21st century astronomers believed they were in an era of precision cosmology and had determined that gravity in the universe was dominated by strange dark matter and the expansion of the universe accelerated due to even stranger dark energy.

Both have fueled the most accurate model of the universe. We have a model known as Lambda C M and yet James Web had revealed large galaxies that appeared to exist. In the first billion years of the life of the cosmos, contrary to the predictions of this very controversial model, some scientists have been forced to revise their theories on the formation of galaxies, but others, much more concerned, fear for the very foundations of our understanding of the galaxy. the universe but this is not the first time that new eyes in the sky demand a review of the Cosmos since the earliest times people have looked at the Stars to discover the functioning of the universe and since the earliest times they have been surprised by

what

they saw and So what do we understand about those first galaxies that formed in the dark just after the Big Bang?

And do these surprises dropped by James Web derail our understanding of the universe or help further strengthen its foundations? The first food consumed in Space was a meat and liver paste that Yuri Karin put into her mouth as if it were salty toothpaste. He followed it with chocolate sauce. This video has been sponsored by Factor, the best, healthiest meal delivery service out there and an impossible dream for the first astronauts. Their menus are healthy. It is updated weekly and includes more than 27 meals and 33 complementary options. You can choose your favorite meals or let Factor put together your order based on your taste preferences and eating history.

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The invention of the telescope is implicitly linked to the birth of modern science just over half a century after Galileo Isaac Newton also led His attention to the sky by replacing lenses with a silver mirror, revolutionized the design of telescopes, sharpened the image and built the massive telescopes of today, including James Web, but unlike Galileo Newton's observations they did not revolutionize the cosmos, but his discoveries of the laws of motion and gravity certainly did, the orbits of planets, moons and comets were now understood to be not a sign of the Divine, but the result of physical laws that permeate the entire universe.

Astronomical telescopes were constantly developed after Newton's time and through each advance more and more light could be collected. Improved optical systems resulted in clearer and sharper images. Astronomers now had the tools to reveal the true beauty and complexity of the universe. And then what did they see besides stars and planets? The skies were often home to magnificent comets, and in the mid-18th century, French astronomer Charles Messier was searching for these celestial bodies. He was searching for the fuzzy coma of a comet formed as ice and Dust boiled from the comet's surface, but in searching for it he was constantly frustrated.

We now know that comets are icy rocky bodies that orbit the Sun, and Messier expected the fuzzy coma to move night after night during the comet's travels, but he found numerous fuzzy objects that stayed stubbornly in place without changing at all Messier He decided to calm his frustration by cataloging all of these anomalies, ignoring them if he happened to detect one, and so, although Messier's catalog of 110 objects contains mainly simple clouds of gas within our Milky Way unknown to us. Many of his Messier objects were much more distant to Throughout the 19th century, with better telescopes, astronomers had found structures in some of Messier's objects, spiral patterns that hinted that the objects must be spinning.

Finally, two giants of astronomy faced off to resolve the issue. and in 1921 a great debate began about the nature of these spiral nebulae, the protagonists being Harow Shapley and Hea Curtis. In Shapley's mind, our own Milky Way was the entire universe, while Curtis argued that they were extremely distant individual galaxies that remained out there during the debate. ended in a stalemate very soon the issue would be resolved once and for all in the 20th century telescope mirrors had grown to more than a meter in size and in the 192s Edwin Hubble used the 2.5 Hooker telescope M to study the heavens was then when The scale of the cosmos grew immensely and definitively when it demonstrated that spiral nebulae are far beyond our Milky Way, while the flow of galaxies moving away from us shows that we live in an expanding Universe , within a few years our view of the cosmos had been completely revolutionized and countless rewritten galaxies, each containing billions of stars, were scattered throughout the Universe in a cosmos no longer considered immutable and eternal, but rather a dynamic place that It expands and evolves and that emerged at some point in the past, the story of this big bang, our Cosmic Birth.

It has been said many times and after the fiery creation of the universe we understood that it was smooth and characteristic, but this still left a question: where did all the galaxies we see today come from? What forces sculpted the universe throughout the 20th century. Telescopes continued to grow and explore more of the cosmos More mysteries were revealed: dark matter and dark energy are among the largest and, at the dawn of the 21st century, 10-meter telescopes were now peering into the darkness, these ground-based telescopes They were complemented by telescopes in space, the most famous being Hubble.

Telescope launched into orbit in 1990, its mirror of only 2.5 m in diameter is small compared to the giants on Earth, but being beyond the bright effects of the atmosphere, it can see more clearly than the others. For the past three decades, the sharpness of Hubble's observations has captivated both astronomers and the public and posters with spectacular images are plastered on walls around the world, but not long after Hubble was placed in space and open its eyes on the universe, plans were put in place to replace it with a larger, more powerful telescope, the mission had to be ambitious, push the limits of technology and surpass Hubble's view, the planned mirror had to be so large that It wouldn't fit in even the largest rocket, so it would have to be segmented and folded like scientific origami and be one of the most powerful.

Rockets would be needed to launch it into the darkness of space through numerous delays and cost blowouts. This new telescope, the James Web Space Telescope, was found on the launch pad and that Christmas morning in 2021 took off from the Earth on which astronomers had pinned their hopes. this billion-dollar feat of technology and science in the hopes of conclusively answering the most important question of all, just one: where do galaxies come from? How can a map of the universe be used to plot a course through the center of an atom? The James Web Space Telescope is the latest in a long line of telescopes we have had since Skyward, but it is not surprising that the prize could well go to the Plank satellite launched in 2009 and, during its 3 years of operation, the most known cold in outer space at 0.1° above the absolute temperature.

Zero's mission was not to look at stars or galaxies but to map the entire sky, and counterintuitively, scientists have been able to shrink this billion-wide map to map the microscopic world that reveals the landscape of the

beginning

of time. and a long line of satellites used to map the cosmic microwave background radiation left over from the early moments of the universe. This had been discovered in the 1960s and Plank's goal was to look for waves in this emission from the sky for small variations in temperature. of the cosmic microwave background Throughout the Universe, the temperature of the cosmic microwave background is about 2.75 degrees above absolute zero, but shortly after its discovery there were indications that this temperature was not the same everywhere , approximately one part in 10,000 of temperature difference, this pattern of The waves formed in the earliest moments of the universe, when the cosmos was extremely different from the one we see around us today, and yet, despite this vast chasm of the time, these waves are essential for our existence, since they reveal the ultimate origin of galaxies.

To look for this origin of galaxies we have to go back a long time, approximately 10 Theus, 36 seconds after the universe was born, when it was nothing more than a churning sea of ​​energy and particles, at that time astronomers think that the Universe changed drastically. the trigger is uncertain, but during the brief periods when the expansion of the universe exploded, cosmologists call this violence inflation an event that flattened the space-time geometry of the cosmos, but at 10 Theus 32 seconds it was all over and an expansion calmer it resumed expansion. Inflation froze and emptied the universe, but when it came to an end, the immense energy of inflation returned to the vacuum and from there matter and radiation, electrons, photons and quarks emerged, gently filling space with the matter of the current universe, but not at all. because there were small, almost imperceptible waves in the cosmos, waves that would end up being crucial to our own existence because gravity extended from these overdensities and began to attract other matter and it was these tiny overdensities that would become the gravitational seeds of the galaxies thatwe see today, but where did these waves come from?

How far back does this origin story go back? To understand the ultimate origin of galaxies, we have to draw the veil over the first moments of the cosmos, the time before inflation, in these initial moments. of time quantum mechanics reigns supreme at the smallest scale, much smaller than the scale of an atom. Quantum energy churns and churns fluctuating in and out of existence itself. These fluctuations are unpredictable, governed by the probabilistic world of the quantum and defined by the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. says that energy can appear spontaneously out of nowhere as long as you rebalance and pay off your energy debt in the right time frame, but the onset of inflation broke the harmony of this quantum loan system, rapid expansion disrupts payment and quantum waves in The energy freezes in space, it also inflates the size of the waves from microscopic to macroscopic and at the end of the inflation it is these waves that are filled with the matter of the cosmos and this is how we can use a map of the entire universe, the cosmic microwave. background to investigate the microscopic Quantum World Despite these vast changes at the end of inflation, the universe was still very young and, as it cooled and expanded, it continued to evolve at a millionth of a second, protons and neutrons solidified at from the soup of particles and at the same time. 1 second Mark these began to combine into the first Elements in a couple of thousand seconds these first steps of the universe were completed the universe had expanded and cooled and the nuclear furnace slowly died out these fires of creation faded and died and the The universe was plunged into inky blackness.

These dark ages would envelop the universe for 100 million years, but like the dark ages of early medieval Europe, they were far from quiet. Gravity's control had become stronger as matter flowed from less dense areas to more dense ones. regions, but what was flowing in the darkness, of course, was the subatomic soup of hydrogen and helium nuclei along with electrons, photons and ethereal neutrinos, but hidden in the black were more, much, more and atoms than the Big Bang had created. huge amounts of other matter that still dominates the mass of the cosmos today in the dark, dark matter had begun to flow, as now this strange Dark Matter dominated the gravitational PSE of the universe and in the early Universe, in the dark, it was matter dark accumulating.

In excessively dense regions, the gravitational pull of Dark Matter was irresistible, attracting nuclear electrons, photons and neutrinos. In the darkness, dense regions grew and the first Whispers of galaxies had truly begun, but the matter followed a different path unlike Dark Matter, whose physics is an extremely simple gas. This extremely complicated gas can collide and generate heat and, more importantly, cool, so when the universe was about 100 million years old, the gas was dense and cold enough to eventually break up. These fragments collapsed under the continuous action of gravity and as they collapsed the density of the fragments grew as they became more spherical the temperatures of the cores of these fragments soared and nuclear reactions were ignited and the first stars were eventually born. in the cosmos and light began to return to the universe however these early stars were quite different from their modern day counterparts their counterparts were purely hydrogen and helium and many were huge, over 100 times more massive than our sun, they burned brightly for about a few million years before dying in supern noi, despite these brief lives, its intense light, mainly ultraviolet and high energy crashed into the immense clouds of surrounding hydrogen, tore off their electrons and reionized the universe, more and more of the cosmos was transformed back into plasma, a situation that persists today for 99.9% of all atomic matter in our world. universe is in the form of superheated plasma when these first generations of stars burned up as they died, they contaminated the universe in their nuclear hearts heavier elements such as carbon and oxygen had been forged. and through their explosive demise, these elements had been cast into darkness, the chemical enrichment of the universe was truly underway, and yet, through all these changes, gravity never changed, never wavered, continued to bind matter and As the homogeneities continued to grow, groups of stars finally fell. together merging and forming larger groups of stars, the time of the first galaxies had arrived, it is impossible to determine exactly when a galaxy is born.

The mass densities seeded by quantum fluctuations are continuous and, although marked by the first stars that come to life, the process of galactic growth. It continues inexorably but grows, first through constant accretion and then through collisions of more appreciable chunks of matter that cosmologists call these chunks Halos Dark Matter, gas and stars United by their mutual gravity and, as time passes Over time, more massive, gravitationally dominant halos are dispersed throughout the Universe. As they emerge, these dominant halos become the spectacle of future galactic growth, and as their gravitational influence grows, so does their dominance. More and more matter comes within reach, providing the raw materials to build future generations of stars.

These initial stages of galactic growth were quite uneven. Most of these baby galaxies are small and grow slowly, more massive and intense. Galactic growth is much rarer, in fact this immense expanse of galactic masses is still imprinted on the universe today and, for smaller galaxies, these early stages of life were quite dangerous and could potentially host a massive star burning brightly for a few million years only to go supernova with the violence of its death expelling all other gases in the galaxy the weak gravitational pole of the small galaxy losing this gas to the universe its star-forming life ended before it had barely begun Many of these small but extinct galaxies would have inhabited the early Universe.

Dark Matter Halos devoid of all atoms and all stars. These elusive dead ghost galaxies were doomed to remain dark and invisible and should still fill our universe today, but more massive galaxies were different. In a larger galaxy, gravity could cause the gas to be recycled back into the next generation of stars and Thus, while many galaxies were extinguished in the early Cosmos, others grew fat with stars and gas that they continued to consume in their deep new gravitational wells. Stars were born, lived and died, but they were different from the first generation of stars. Through each generation of stars, heavier and heavier elements are ejected and contaminate the cosmos and these are recycled in subsequent generations.

These elements barely represent a trace compared to the dominant ones. hydrogen and helium, but their presence drastically influences the life cycles of their hosts. Heavier elements mixed into the layers of stars change their opacity. This is a measure of how easy it is for nuclear energy in the stellar heart to escape and trap radiation. Stars more similar to our sun are beginning to be born with longer lives and less explosive extremes. As billions of years passed, some galaxies began to adopt a calmer lifestyle, but violence still existed in the universe, a violence that began from the beginning, a violence that would continue to create some of the most extreme environments. of the cosmos to understand them and understand how the first galaxies became the galactic zoo we see today, we will first have to take a trip to the mid-20th century, to a time when astronomers We face a mystery on a truly cosmic scale. .

Carl Jansky was confused. It was 1932, the early days of transatlantic radio communications. The world was getting used to transmitting voices across thousands of miles, but there was something about the signal she heard in these transmissions that worried Jansy. a persistent background hiss, though it wasn't the existence of this background static that unnerved him, but rather the immaculate timing of it. Fansy had discovered that his static varied with the time of day and differed in intensity on a regular schedule, how was this possible? How could his electronics know what? The time of day he was taking measurements of him was even stranger as his observations stretched out over days, days, weeks, and months.

He realized that the static was not quite aligned with the 24 hours of the solar day. The time of the variable noise changed slowly but constantly. across the sky seemed to be synchronized with the sidereal day - the time it takes for distant stars to circle the Earth - the difference was small - just four minutes - but the implications were profound because it meant that the source of Jansky's radio noise lay far beyond of the Earth and the Sun and resided deep in the heavens at that time many astronomers were scanning the heavens with their telescopes focusing the optical light that they knew was emerging from the stars and galaxies but Jansy realized that other electromagnetic radiation was arriving of the universe and the era of radio astronomy was Born Unfortunately, Jansky would not play any additional role in laying the groundwork after having identified the source of the radio noise.

His employer, Bell Labs, assigned him other jobs, but his name is remembered and is now used as a unit of intensity of radio waves from the sky. With the announcement of radio waves from space others took up the mantle soon waves were detected. Gro Reber built the first true radio telescope, was the only radio astronomer for a decade, and made it clear that our own Milky Way was shining in this new light, but that was not all, as later maps of the radio sky showed that there were many more sources, there were powerful radio emissions radiating from small points all over the sky and thus the first quasi-stellar radio sources or Se began to find quazars Astronomers now know of more than a million quazars spread throughout the cosmos.

They have been found to be powered by supermassive black holes with masses more than a billion times that of our sun and are so powerful that we can see. From great distances and going back in time for more than 10 billion years, these supermassive black holes are thought to have perhaps formed from the death of the first supermassive stars and, after feeding voraciously and merging, they became the central gravitational point of many larger galaxies and so, during the first billion years of the universe, it burned with activity, the fires of the first stars, the first galaxies and the first quazars burned brightly, but after this passed first age, the vigor of youth began to wane and cosmic activity began to calm the universe.

However, over the past 10 billion years they have settled into a more sedentary life, although the rate of star formation has steadily declined. Galaxies have continued to evolve and change, driven by the endless pull of gravity. Small galaxies have steadily grown into large galaxies as they have accumulated more stars. and dark matter and large galaxies have grown even larger, feasting on their cosmic neighbors, some galaxies have been completely shaped by their spin as cooled galactic-scale gas collapsed into a flattened pancake that fragmented into stars. This immense, constantly rotating disk of stars has become the definition. Characteristic of these galaxies are the beautiful spirals that we see today through our telescopes, but for other galaxies their journey towards spiral beauty has been truncated because collisions between more massive galaxies have violently torn them apart and robbed them of their spin. instead of settling on rotating disks.

They transform from Med into more shapeless objects: elliptical galaxies, the other major type of galaxy spied in the heavens, and these elliptical galaxies are a harbinger of our own galactic destiny. Elliptical and spiral galaxies do not capture all the galaxy patterns we can see, and astronomers have more classification of irregular ones to capture the rest. These warped galaxies appear to be scarred by more recent galactic interactions, perhaps trapped in the middle of the galaxy.transformation before they finally settle. Astronomers estimate that there may be a trillion galaxies in the observable universe in abundance. Ranging in size from tiny to immense, most galaxies are small, with only a handful of billions of stars inside, while the largest we know of is more than 200 times more massive than our own Milky Way, one One of the most surprising discoveries of the last century was not only the galaxies themselves, but also the realization that galaxies are not simply scattered randomly throughout the cosmos through the action of gravity; the quantum seeds that are imprinted in inflation are molded into a complex web of mass known as the cosmic web;

The subdensity volumes are emptied with matter attracted to more massive regions, while some galaxies and dark matter remain, these scattered regions can extend for millions of light years, the matter that comes out gathers in immense sheets and filaments and continues to be attracted towards the most massive objects in the cosmos, but where are they? All these galaxies undertake their journeys from the voids and through the sheets and filaments of this complex network in which dark matter is distributed like a sponge. There are superdense regions. It is these massive regions that are the ultimate gravitational target of all mass. galaxy clusters Galaxy clusters are incredible places, some host many thousands of galaxies, these galaxies move in immense halos of dark matter that far exceed all the stars, the highest concentration of mass in the entire universe and whose hearts are

really

huge. monsters because it is here where the most massive galaxies seen in the entire Cosmos grow.

These central galaxy clusters, disappointingly called CD galaxies, are true Giants of the universe built from hundreds of billions of stars wrapped in a massive amount of Dark Matter. Cosmic giants found deep within. inside the gravity well and are surrounded by thousands of other galaxies that move even further away. Astronomers have discovered that the clusters themselves cluster into even more immense structures they call superclusters. In our portion of the universe, we appear to be embedded in the Lan. AA is home to many millions of galaxies, although the question of whether gravity holds superclusters together remains a matter of debate.

Just as galaxies come in an immense variety of sizes, so do galaxy clusters, and even for each of the smallest clusters there are myriad galaxies. structures these are the groups in which most of the galaxies in the universe live, they usually host one, two or a handful of larger galaxies, similar in scale to our own Milky Way, with them there will be a large number of larger galaxies small, possibly hundreds of dwarfs, all bound together by their mutual gravity and that of the dark matter that accompanies them, in fact, our Milky Way lives within such a group, a group that we share with the Andromeda galaxy and this The local group, as it is known, contains a large number of other galaxies, some of them are visible to the naked eye, specifically the melanic clouds seen in the southern hemisphere, but more than a hundred other galaxies are under the control gravitation of this local group, most of these smaller galaxies have only come to light in recent decades, as revealed by deep studies. with new telescopes appearing even deeper into the darkness and the presence of all these dwarfs orbiting among the largest galaxies told astronomers something important: the era of galactic evolution is far from over Rodrigo Iarta was a young graduate student Working on his PhD at the University of Cambridge, he was studying at the world-famous Institute of Astronomy founded by famous cosmologist Fred Hil and his research focused on understanding the dynamics of stars close to the galactic nucleus, but to do so he needed the power of a telescope.

More than 15,000 km away, on the outskirts of the small rural town of Kuna Baraban, is the Siding Springs Observatory, which in the early 1970s housed several telescopes. He saw the inauguration of the Anglo-Australian telescope with a 3.9 M mirror, it was the latest in technology for his time and still leads the world today with unique instrumentation. Rodrigo had traveled to Australia to measure the velocities and chemistry of stars in the central galactic bulge using the power of an instrument called Auto FIB mounted on the Anglo-Australian telescope with a combination of optical fibers Aluto FIB could observe more than 50 stars at Bulge astronomers rarely make discoveries when sitting at the telescope.

The raw data they take usually requires processing and analysis to reveal its secrets. With the Proto Internet of the early 1990s, this meant taking data home on tape and Rodrigo set to work under often cloudy skies. and the rainy skies of the Cambridge flat F, astronomers had made predictions about the velocities of stars in the central regions of the galaxy, expecting the stars to rotate in random orbits, as opposed to the circular paths in the galactic disk and in some of its target fields. It's just what Rodrigo saw, but in some fields, however, Rodrigo was presented with a puzzle: the stars in the galactic bulge were still there moving back and forth, but there was something else, stars all moving together.

Stars whose origin could not be in the center of our Milky Way. Like most astronomers, Rodrigo's first conclusion was that he had made a mistake somewhere in his analysis, perhaps he had measured the velocities incorrectly or had missed something in the predicted motions, but eventually, when he ruled out all The other possibilities, he had to conclude that what he saw was

really

what he had discovered together with his supervisors Jerry Gilmore and Mike Irwin he came to a radical conclusion: the stars he was seeing were simply not part of the galaxy, these stars were intruders in the Milky Way falling from somewhere outside of what Rodrigo had found.

It was the Sagittarius dwarf, a small galaxy crashing into ours. The Sagittarius dwarf was hidden in plain sight with its faint light spread over a huge area of ​​the sky and as Rodrigo spilled over old photographic IM Imes of the galactic center, the image of it steadily emerged, it was clear. Since its appearance, it was being disturbed by the gravity of our own galaxy and, in a few billion years, Sagittarius would be completely destroyed. Its stars were added to our own since the 1990s. It was realized that Sagittarius was not a single event and that the Milky Way is consuming several other dwarf galaxies and is constantly growing Andromeda is also engulfed in the tidal remains of dwarf galaxies recently consumed;

The feeding that began many billions of years ago and continues today astronomers call this phenomenon galactic cannibalism and thus we contribute our understanding of the universe. To this day and our superficially uneventful lives within the Milky Way, astronomers like Rodrigo have built their observations on the shoulders of giants. Previous generations of astrophysicists and cosmologists worked together to model and test how galaxies work and go back in time billions of years. years to theorize how it all came to be, and yet if you were to believe the 2022 headlines, all of this, from quantum waves to theories of galaxy formation, may have been fundamentally wrong, this story began with the mighty roar of a rocket on a Christmas morning and a new vision of the universe surprised astronomers galaxies that seemed too big and too grown up blinking at us from the first billion years of the cosmos one scientific article even began its title with panic at the disks, highlighting the shock Well, soon newspapers around the world were announcing that the James Web Space Telescope had put an end to cosmology itself; our complete understanding of galactic formation was threatened worldwide;

Cosmologists gnashed their teeth at the media's withholding and jumped to clarify which website had seen what their observations really meant and therefore to understand this we are going to have to dig deeper into our current model of the cosmos because it all comes down to a key question: what kind of universe do we live in? Many scientific stories begin in the first decades of the 20th century. Einstein had debated his general theory of relativity, our modern theory of gravity and with others such as Fredman and L. Metra derived the equations that governed the cosmos, these demonstrated that the universe should be a dynamic place that expanded and evolved. as it aged in the 1920s.

Hubble's observations showed that this math was an accurate description of the reality that galaxies were moving away from each other due to the expansion of space and that galaxies should have been closer together. in the 1920s. In the past there must have been a time where everything came together a cosmic creation our modern cosmology the Big Bang had arrived the relativistic cosmological equations however do not predict a single specific Universe in fact there are an infinite number of possible universes Mixed into the mathematics to make our universe stand out, astronomers needed to measure two specific things about the universe, namely how fast it is expanding now and what it contains.

The measured expansion rate is known as the Hubble constant and tells you how fast galaxies are moving apart. At their current separation, the separation of nearby galaxies is slower than that of more separated ones, since there is a greater expansion of space between the two distant objects. The measurement of the Hubble constant was a major observational effort of the 20th century, in which astronomers formed factions around particular techniques and measured values. of the constant, the process was complicated since precise measurements of galactic distances were required and since the universe does not provide us with cosmic rulers, these were notoriously difficult to measure.

For half a century, there was debate over whether the Hubble constant was 50 or 100 . when expressed in cosmologists' favorite unit, the kilometer per second per MEAP Parc, but in the 1990s the power of the Hubble Space Telescope was used to solve the problem and astronomers breathed a sigh of relief when it was shown that The measured value was 72, approximately 235 km. one second per million light years, so one of the key values ​​determined what happens to the content of the universe. This was an essential ingredient as the presence of matter and radiation slows expansion and constantly slows down the cosmos with more material providing more of a slowdown as this influences the age of the universe, astronomers were interested in measuring how many things Counting starlight was relatively easy, since you can simply zoom through your telescope and see galaxies, but astronomers had realized that there was more to the universe than just stars.

The rotations of galaxies and the movements in galaxy clusters showed that much more of the universe's mass was actually dominated by invisible dark matter. Since dark matter is almost impossible to observe, astronomers decided to chart another expansion path. cosmic space while looking into the distant universe and by mapping this they were able to determine how much dark matter is driving the expansion in the 1990s, two teams set out to use the light from exploding stars as beacons to do just this, the search team for supernovae and the supernova cosmology project, observational challenges were again substantial, requiring precise measurements to be made.

Their focus was supern noi 1A stars whose explosions appeared to be essentially identical, allowing them to calibrate their true brightness and thus measure distances and, as the New Millennium approached, They had their graph of the history of the expansion of the universe, but As they looked at the data, astronomers were confused: they had expected that, due to the presence of matter, cosmic expansion should have been steadily slowing down, but while this had been the case in the early universe in our time it was not, So they were faced with the question of what could be driving the increasingly rapid expansion.

Looking at the relativistic equations of the cosmos, the culprit could not be matter or radiation. Something else would have to be added to the universe. new form of energy throughout space and this energy would have to have different properties than matter or radiation that would make it push rather than pull the expansion. This mysterious substance not previously seen in observations was called Dark Energy, but it was not onlythe presence of dark energy that shocked. Astronomers also discovered that all light and dark matter accounted for only 30% of the cosmic energy budget, while this ubiquitous dark energy accounted for the other 70% and, like atoms in the form of stars, planets and gas, accounts for about 5%. we really live in a dark Universe, astronomers had isolated our universe from the infinity of possibilities, the Infinity of options, we finally knew which Universe we lived in, they called it the Lambda CDM cosmological model.

Lambda means the presence of dark energy, while CDM means cold Dark Matter. the material that shapes the formation and evolution of galaxies and it was with this that they were able to precisely pinpoint the moment of the creation of a big bang 13.8 billion years ago with the Lambda CDM cosmological model in hand we can calibrate The light of the universe from distant objects is redshifted due to the expansion of space and we can link this redshift to the age of the universe when the light began its journey. In fact, it is this cosmological model that tells us that the James Web Space Telescope is seeing galaxies in the first billion years of the cosmos. and web observations actually threaten our cosmological framework.

The difficulty is that the mathematical equations of cosmology only tell us about the large-scale evolution of the universe, not about the detailed flow of dark matter and gas into the first galaxies to understand growth. of galaxies we need to add more to the cosmological equations and this is where astronomers face important challenges, since the growth of galaxies depends on a large number of factors ranging from scales of millions of light years, tracing the flow of matter in the large-scale structure up to In addition to observing individual galaxies and witnessing starlight through telescopes, and we even need to add the fragmentation of gas clouds and star formation to the mix, not only this, but the first Stars evolve rapidly and explode throwing material and energy into the surroundings, all of this needs to be tracked and tracked in a swirling environment where massive black holes can lurk.

Astronomers try to capture all this complexity in a set of mathematical recipes and these recipes represent our models of how galaxies form and evolve, but the key here is in plural as there. There is no single preferred model to explain it. All physical conditions and processes in the early Universe are partly mysterious and unknown. Astronomers have to resort to approximations and even guesses when constructing aspects of their models, and it is the veracity of these models that is decisive. being put to the test by James Webb In the short time that has passed since the claim of the demise of cosmology, enthusiasm has died a little, astronomers have realized that there is enough slack in their models to account for the observations from the web, a tune here and a tweak there and the galaxies the telescope is aiming for are not so surprising that astronomers may have been led astray by some of the initial assumptions that were made, take for example something known as a function of initial stellar mass, this tells us the mix of stars formed when a giant gas cloud fragments and collapses, usually there will be some bright massive stars and many weaker and smaller stars, but what if their initial stellar mass is incorrect?

The initial stellar mass function is something we can measure and calculate in the local universe, but the assumption that it was similar more than 10 billion years ago is just a guess, we know that in early times the universe was very different from today and then what if the stellar initial mass function was also different and what if it was biased and resulted in birth? If there were more luminous stars than expected, these young galaxies would burn brighter than expected and astronomers would estimate that they are larger than expected. At the moment, not everyone is happy, but there is a feeling that there is a problem with models of galaxy evolution, the underlying cosmological model.

Lambda CDM seems to be safe, if James Webb tells us anything it is that the early Universe was more complicated than we have imagined so far and this is precisely what it was designed to do. You have been observing the entire history of the universe. Don't forget to like, subscribe and leave us a comment to tell us what you think. Thanks for watching. See you next time.