The James Webb Space Telescope has only been in use for a few weeks, but it has already delivered a startling find: tens, hundreds, maybe even 1000 times more bright galaxies in the early universe than expected.
Michael Boylan-Kolchin is a professor at the University of Texas, Austin. "Galaxies are exploding out of the woodwork."
Current models hold that gas clouds should be much slower to coalesce into stars and galaxies than the images of the early universe suggest. Illingworth is a professor at the University of California Santa Cruz.
The European and Canadian space agencies have contributed to the observatory which is 1.5 million kilometers from Earth. The Cosmic Evolution Early Release Science (CEERS) Survey is one of the projects that has been devoted the most to date. The Hubble Space Telescope was used to explore deeper into the universe. The mirror has six times the area of Hubble and is able to catch more light from distant sources.
When the universe was just 230 million years old, it was found to be the most distant ever seen. Since then, they have shown that the object is part of a stunning profusion of early galaxies, each small by today's standards, but more Luminous than Astronomers had expected.
The abundance is based on images of a small patch of sky. Boylan-Kolchin wonders if Webb just got lucky and looked into a huge clump of galaxies, denser than the rest of the early universe. The question will be answered when results from other surveys come in.
It is1-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-6556 The gold standard for measuring a galaxy's age is due to the fact that the reddening of its light can be accuratelymeasured. It takes a long time to gather the spectrum from many different places. A relatively crude method has been used to estimate the age of the universe from the color of the images. Astronomers can get a rough measurement of color by looking at the light from the near-IR camera. Dust around a galaxy can make it look redder, as it can absorb starlight and re-emit it at longer wavelength.
Several recent preprints show that the early science teams have identified a few masquerading galaxies. It is possible that the profusion of early galaxies is not real.
If gravity alone was in charge, star formation would take about 100 times longer than it does now. As the first stars start to shine, they inject more heat into the gas to stop further star formation. The first stars are short-lived giants, when they explode as supernovae they heat up gas clouds even more or blast them out of a forming galaxy.
As far back as 600 million years after the big bang, studies with Hubble show that the rate of star formation has not changed. The results suggest that at earlier times its pace was much more rapid, as if gas clouds were collapsing without any resistance.
According to Tommaso Treu of UC Los Angeles, his team is seeing stars like crazy. He said they looked like giant balls of star formation.
Theorists don't know if the higher densities of matter and higher temperatures of the early universe speeded star formation. The primordial matter leftover from the big bang could have formed the first stars without the heavier elements.
The current understanding of how the universe evolved may be incorrect. After the big bang, the unseen dark matter that makes up most of the stuff of the universe clumped together under its own gravity into "halos." The halos drew in normal matter and created the conditions for it to grow. The number of halos and the number of galaxies are predicted by the Lambda-CDM. Boylan-Kolchin said there was not much wiggle room.
It may be possible to modify lambda-CDM to make it better. The era of inflation, when quantum fluctuations grew into areas of higher or lower matter density, may be the cause of the big bang. That could be fundamental if inflation is wrong. I wouldn't bet on that being the case.
The data needed to answer the problem may be provided by the man. Young, hot, bright stars are the only ones that have been seen thus far. If you use a ground-based radio telescope, you can see the gas clouds that are building stars in the long wavelength. Astronomers might be able to confirm that early galaxies were lots of star factories.
We will have a better picture in 6 months. This is a very exciting time.
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