This image of a galaxy in the early universe is anything but dazzling.
What you’re looking at is a very blurry, dust-encrusted universe whose names are just strings of numbers and letters. Even if you are sitting quite far away, earth That means it slips in and out of the watchful eyes of various telescopes. This image captured by the powerful James Webb Space Telescope spotlights the galaxy AzTECC71. But what’s surprising here is that he sees AzTECC71 as it was just 900 million years after the Big Bang.then macrocosm I turned on the power first Performerabsolute for a long time before us the solar system was born.
of james webb space telescopeHis view of this galaxy as a faint speck of light is very different from many other galaxies. amazing images of the galaxy Its repertoire also includes galaxy clusters. But even this dirt contains important lessons for understanding the early universe.
“The fact that even such extremes are barely visible in the most sensitive images from our modern telescopes is very interesting to me,” said study author Jed McKinney of the University of Texas at Austin. said. statement. “It suggests that there is potentially a population of galaxies that are hidden from us.”
Related: James Webb Space Telescope discovers two of the most distant galaxies ever observed
This could mean the early Universe may have been dustier than previously thought, and could explain how the Universe has evolved since the Big Bang happened about 13.8 billion years ago. Scientists say they can learn a little more about this.
AzTECC71 was first discovered as an incomprehensible blob of light by the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope in Hawaii. It was later observed by the ALMA radio telescope in Chile. But then it appeared to disappear in the images taken. hubble space telescope.
“This is a real monster,” McKinney said. “What may seem like small clumps is actually hundreds of new stars forming every year.”
As part of an international effort to map the universe’s earliest structure, a chunk of sky the size of three full moons from Earth, McKinney and his colleagues searched for galaxies in the data collected by JWST. I did. The observatory’s powerful and unprecedented infrared eye can peer into the thick clouds of dust that prevailed in the early universe.
Before JWST, finding these galaxies was nearly impossible. Light from birth stars deep within dusty galaxies was absorbed at wavelengths by the dust itself and re-radiated at fainter, longer wavelengths that JWST could capture. One in five such galaxies was invisible to Hubble, forming a group that astronomers call “Hubble dark galaxies.”
“That means our understanding of the history of galaxy evolution is biased because we only see unobstructed, dust-free galaxies,” McKinney said. Ta.
In the near future, McKinney and his team plan to use JWST data to discover even fainter hidden galaxies. This data allows us to “not only peer into the farthest reaches of the universe, but also pierce through the thickest veils of dust.”
Regarding this research, paper Published in The Astrophysical Journal in October.