![]() ![]() “That signature is very characteristic of these very distant galaxies, and it’s very difficult for any other objects to make in such a dramatic manner.”Ī zoomed-out view of Glassy (Tommaso Treu / NASA / CSA / ESA / STScI) Glassy “is detected very, very well in the redder wavelengths, but when you go to the bluer wavelengths, it just completely drops out, and it drops out very dramatically,” Rohan Naidu, an astronomer at Harvard who led one of the teams that spotted the galaxy, told me. Astronomers know that the redder light is, the farther away the galaxy that produced it. Starlight from distant galaxies leaves its source as visible light, but by the time it reaches us, it is “redshifted” down the electromagnetic spectrum into the infrared range-invisible to our eyes, but perfect for Webb’s sensors. The universe has been expanding ever since the Big Bang, a process that stretches light into longer, redder wavelengths. The teams that found Glassy have dated it by studying the properties of its light. (I’ll call the galaxy Glassy to make things easier the data set that produced the discovery is known as GLASS.) But if it’s confirmed, Glassy’s red glow would break the current record, set by a galaxy spotted through the Hubble Space Telescope in 2015, for the most ancient light ever observed by 100 million years or so. For another, the astronomers who spotted the galaxy in the Webb data-two separate teams, working independently, one of which calls its find GLASS-z13 and the other GHZ2-will need to make new observations to confirm its distance. For one thing, the finding has yet to undergo peer review. The new galaxy is still only a candidate for the title of most distant galaxy ever discovered. Read: This is the picture astronomers have been waiting for Plus, the galaxy appeared in a tiny field of view, smaller than a crater on the moon in the night sky who knows what else Webb will find in the entire moon’s worth of sky? With each deep observation, every big rewind, the telescope will bring us closer to the Big Bang, revealing faint galaxy after galaxy. Astronomers haven’t even cranked up the Webb telescope as far as it can go they’ve given it a little poke, and already distant galaxies like this one are “just falling off the tree,” Jane Rigby, a NASA astrophysicist and the Webb operations project scientist, told me. Neither of the teams that spotted the cosmic tomato expected to find a galaxy like this so soon, in their very first observations of this kind. Several astronomers I’ve spoken with say that the preliminary discovery, if it holds true, could have extraordinary implications for the next era of astronomy. ![]() Hello, Glassy (Tommaso Treu / Pascal Oesch / NASA / CSA / ESA / STScI) So by gazing upon this red blob, we are looking back more than 13.5 billion years, at a cosmic memory. When Webb captures this ancient, well-traveled light, the telescope becomes a time machine. The glow of the most distant galaxies, the kind that the observatory was designed to detect, takes eons to reach us. So, so much has happened since then-our sun flickered on, the planets were formed, life arose on Earth, Ring Pops were invented. According to two separate teams of astronomers, that blurry tomato we’re seeing is the way this galaxy looked just 300 million years after the universe came into existence. The starlight that Webb spotted from this galaxy left its glittery boundaries long ago, before, well, nearly everything. The galaxy was spotted by the James Webb Space Telescope, the newest and most powerful observatory in the world, which kicked off operations last week. I say these things because without invoking little earthly associations, I’m not sure how we’d even begin to fathom what this cosmic object is: not just a galaxy, but perhaps the most distant galaxy we have ever seen. Just a red blob, so blurry and edgeless that the first time I looked, I had to make sure I’d put my contact lenses in. The newly discovered galaxy looks a little bit like a squashed tomato, or maybe the crown of a cherry-flavored Ring Pop. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |