![]() ![]() The team spotted these record holders in a patch of sky that the Hubble Space Telescope once scoured for ultra-remote galaxies ( SN: 1/3/10). ![]() “Thanks to this glorious telescope, we’re now getting spectra … for hundreds of galaxies at once,” said astronomer Emma Curtis-Lake of the University of Hertfordshire in England.Īmong those are four of the earliest galaxies ever seen, some of which existed less than 400 million years after the Big Bang, Curtis-Lake and colleagues reported at the meeting and in a paper submitted December 8 to. Those measurements are slower and more difficult to make than pictures. To measure the distances precisely, astronomers need spectra, measurements of how much light the galaxies emit across many wavelengths. “Almost across the board, the science performance is better than expected.”Įven in the very first image, released in July, astronomers spotted galaxies whose light originated 13 billion years ago or more ( SN: 7/11/22). Rigby, of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., is the JWST operations project scientist. “JWST is the most powerful infrared telescope that has ever been built,” astrophysicist Jane Rigby said at the conference. But now, measurements that were recently impossible are suddenly easy with JWST, researchers say. For the most distant objects, like the first stars and galaxies, their visible light is stretched by the relentless expansion of the universe into longer infrared wavelengths that are invisible to human eyes and some previous space telescopes. That new era is thanks in part to JWST’s ability to see very faint infrared light ( SN: 10/6/21). “We’re entering a new era,” says astronomer Swara Ravindranath of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore. Unless, in some way, we are also seeing future events in some direction? Not sure how that would work.Taken together, the new observations suggest galaxies formed earlier and faster than previously thought. But this is not the case - we see the same "density" of events from all directions. So, we should be able to look one way and see nothing beyond galaxies roughly our own age and no early stars, and look the exact other way and see a much richer history, with more early stars and galaxies layered atop one another. We are just one event way off in a region of that circle necessarily closer to some part of the circumference than others, since our galaxy did not exist at the beginning of the Universe. It won't do just to say the Universe had no "point" in which is started - the BB should be thought of as a sort of circle, the center of which all events spread uniformly from. We can see back a uniform distance, but the fact that this uniform distance seems to reveal the same information in all direction is confusing to me. But this doesn't explain why each direction contains roughly the same timeline of events. An apt comparison would be that we are in a sort of bubble isolated from the rest of the Universe and can only a uniform distance back in all directions. ![]() I understand that we are limited in the amount of light we are able to see. If Earth was located in an unprivileged spot, anywhere but the center of the Universe, then some of the space around us should go "farther back" than others. What seems odd to me is that we see the same things at roughly the same distance from every direction in space. So, by examining far enough into a region of space, we are able to "wind back the clock" to see early galaxies now long dead and some of the earliest stars in the history of the Universe. After seeing the James Webb space picture, in which a tiny sliver of the sky the size of a piece of rice from our perspective here on Earth was examined and revealed contain, as expected, an abundance of galaxies and stars, I am wondering how this confirmation coincides with the Big Bang theory and the concept that Earth is in a non-privileged location in the Universe.Ī common line NASA uses regarding the Webb telescope is that "looking into space is like looking back in time", which is true, for it take time for light from those distant objects to reach us. ![]()
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