Everywhere you look are galaxies.
The powerful James Webb Space Telescope recently captured a new deep field view of the universe, which is a look into some of the farthest reaches of space. In the image below, the hundreds of objects you can see (except for the six-pointed stars in the foreground) are galaxies among the black ether of the cosmos, each teeming with stars and planets. Many are spirals, like our Milky Way galaxy. The deepest ones appear red, as the expanding universe has stretched their light into longer wavelengths of red light.
But that's not all.
This view, which looks back at galaxies billions of years ago — because it takes that long for such old light to reach us — reveals two galaxies and the black holes at their centers merging just some 740 million years after the Big Bang created our universe. The universe is now 13.7 billion years old.
Specialized instruments aboard the Webb telescope called spectrographs — which separate different types of light into different color spectrums, similar to a prism — revealed dense gases rapidly spinning in the galaxies, which helped identify the black holes. (Black holes, wielding extreme gravities, pull matter around them in blazing-hot disks of matter, called accretion disks.)
Astronomers have found that early black holes are extremely massive, which is unexpected because they're so young. But new evidence from Webb, like these new views, show the great mergers occurred long ago.
"Our findings suggest that merging is an important route through which black holes can rapidly grow, even at cosmic dawn," Hannah Übler, an astronomer at the University of Cambridge who led the research, said in a statement. "Together with other Webb findings of active, massive black holes in the distant Universe, our results also show that massive black holes have been shaping the evolution of galaxies from the very beginning."
The research was published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
The Webb telescope's powerful abilities
The Webb telescope — a scientific collaboration between NASA, the ESA, and the Canadian Space Agency — is designed to peer into the deepest cosmos and reveal new insights about the early universe. But it's also peering at intriguing planets in our galaxy, along with the planets and moons in our solar system.
Here's how Webb is achieving unparalleled feats, and likely will for decades:
- Giant mirror: Webb's mirror, which captures light, is over 21 feet across. That's over two-and-a-half times larger than the Hubble Space Telescope's mirror. Capturing more light allows Webb to see more distant, ancient objects. As described above, the telescope is peering at stars and galaxies that formed over 13 billion years ago, just a few hundred million years after the Big Bang.
"We're going to see the very first stars and galaxies that ever formed," Jean Creighton, an astronomer and the director of the Manfred Olson Planetarium at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, told Mashable in 2021.
- Infrared view: Unlike Hubble, which largely views light that's visible to us, Webb is primarily an infrared telescope, meaning it views light in the infrared spectrum. This allows us to see far more of the universe. Infrared has longer wavelengths than visible light, so the light waves more efficiently slip through cosmic clouds; the light doesn't as often collide with and get scattered by these densely packed particles. Ultimately, Webb's infrared eyesight can penetrate places Hubble can't.
"It lifts the veil," said Creighton.
- Peering into distant exoplanets: The Webb telescope carries specialized equipment called spectrographs that will revolutionize our understanding of these far-off worlds. The instruments can decipher what molecules (such as water, carbon dioxide, and methane) exist in the atmospheres of distant exoplanets — be they gas giants or smaller rocky worlds. Webb will look at exoplanets in the Milky Way galaxy. Who knows what we'll find?
"We might learn things we never thought about," Mercedes López-Morales, an exoplanet researcher and astrophysicist at the Center for Astrophysics-Harvard & Smithsonian, told Mashable in 2021.
Already, astronomers have successfully found intriguing chemical reactions on a planet 700 light-years away, and as described above, the observatory has started looking at one of the most anticipated places in the cosmos: the rocky, Earth-sized planets of the TRAPPIST solar system.
Topics NASA
