The tiny red dots seen in recent images from the James Webb Space Telescope are driving astronomers crazy. The three dots are actually very far away and are the light of a galaxy that existed 600-800 million years after the Big Bang. These galaxies contain stars and black holes thousands of times more massive than the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way, whose existence seems to contradict the age of the universe.
Because of the expansion of the universe, the wavelength of light from far away has long been stretched and shifted into infrared. The James Webb Space Telescope, built by NASA and the Canadian and European space agencies, is capable of detecting such light, and has been observing the universe for two years since its inception under its own heat shield.
As far as we know, the universe is 13.8 billion years old. The universe was only 5 percent of its current age when the distant galaxies observed by the James Webb Space Telescope existed. Analysis of the light shows that the stars here are only a few hundred million years old, which makes them very old, posing a serious challenge to theories describing cosmic evolution.
Very confusing. You can impose it on current models of the universe, but only if you assume a bizarre and insanely rapid evolution since the beginning of time.
“Without a doubt, this is the strangest celestial object I have encountered in my career,” Penn State University assistant professor Joel Lega wrote in a statement.
According to current models, galaxies and their supermassive black holes grow together, a process that takes billions of years.
Finding ancient stars in a young universe is completely unexpected.
“These findings suggest that the new technology could be used to improve the quality of life for the people in the future,” said Benji Wang, a postdoctoral fellow at Penn State.
Much of the galaxies’ light comes from the glow of material falling into the central black hole — the galaxy’s extremely bright, active core is called a quasar. At this distance, experts couldn’t tell how much of the light came from the center and how much came from the stars. Based on the measurements, either the galaxies were much larger than the Milky Way, or the black holes were just as massive. There was also something else unusual: the quasars were emitting more ultraviolet light than expected.
Despite their greater mass, these galaxies are denser than the Milky Way. They contain between 10 and 1,000 billion stars, but their diameter is only a few hundred light-years, or a millennium of the Milky Way. If things were that dense toward us now, the nearest star, Proxima Centauri, would not be 4.2 light-years away, but inside the solar system. And the central black hole would not be 26,000, but 26 light-years away.
According to Leja, it is possible that stars were formed in a way that is not yet known, and even galaxies themselves.
For some reason, after a few billion years, there were no such things in the universe. Only in the early universe
pointed out.
The red dots were discovered by James Webb in 2022, and scientists have been trying to explain what they’ve been seeing ever since. Models are being used to figure out whether the galaxy could be so bright without so much mass. The research is not finished yet, and Penn State astronomers are trying to find new pieces of the puzzle by analyzing the light spectrum.
(Mashable, Pennsylvania state, Space.com website)
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