Jakarta –
Have you seen the photo above? Well, that’s how it feels to see more than 45,000 galaxies. This photo was captured by the Advanced Deep Extragalactic Survey (JADES) program by the James Webb Space Telescope.
JADES was a major science program that changed knowledge about galaxies in the early universe. As a result, the team of scientists found a number of new knowledge about galaxies when the universe was less than 600 million years old. Quoted from the NASA page, here are the findings.
Scientists Reveal the Secrets of the Galaxy
Help the Universe Fill with Light
The universe was shrouded in mist after its formation according to the theory big bang (big bang). As a result, the universe was dark until the fog disappeared hundreds of millions of years later.
Scientists have found that galaxies from that early period were incredibly powerful. So powerful, this star cluster from the Reionization Age (500-850 million years after big bang) are very bright and very hot, emitting ultraviolet light.
The galactic characteristics of the Reionization Age make the gas atoms in the envelope of the universe ionized. The universe that was once shrouded in mist became transparent and bathed in light.
How old is your favorite galaxy?
As the universe expands, light from super-distant galaxies stretches into longer waves. This change in length also makes the color redder, which is known as the redshift phenomenon.
Apparently, astronomers can measure redshift a galaxy to find out how far away the star cluster is, and how old it is since it was created in the early universe.
Discovery of the Oldest Galaxies
To measure the galaxy, Kevin Hainline of the University of Arizona, Tucson and colleagues used James Webb’s Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam). This measurement is called photometric redshift.
The measurements identified more than 700 new candidate galaxies that have existed since about 370 million-650 million years ago. The observatory’s resolution and sensitivity allow astronomers to get a closer look at galaxies that are very far away.
As a result, the use of the James Webb space telescope helped astronomers uncover the existence of nearly a thousand very distant galaxies. Previously, only dozens of galaxies could be observed through 8 redshift.
“Before, the oldest galaxies we could see only looked like tiny blots. However, those blots represent millions if not billions of stars in the early universe,” Hainline said.
“Now, we can see that some of them are more complex objects and have structures. We can see how these star clusters were born just a few million years from the beginning of life,” he continued.
Marcia Rieke of the University of Arizona, Tucson, a co-leader of the JADES program, said that star formation in the early universe was much more complex than previously thought.
Rieke hopes that his program will eventually gain more knowledge about the mysteries of the universe and its galaxy.
“With JADES, we want to answer a variety of questions, such as how do star clusters arrange themselves? How fast do galaxies form their stars? Why do some galaxies stop making stars?” Rike said.
Watch Video “Appearance of a Milky Way-like Galaxy in the Young Universe“
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2023-06-11 13:00:00
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