Posted on 01/30/2023 10:51:14 AM PST by Red Badger
Distant Galaxy
The image of the most distant galaxy, GHZ2/GLASS-z12. (NASA/ESA/CSA/T. Treu, UCLA/NAOJ/T. Bakx, Nagoya U)
A galaxy whose light has traveled nearly 13.5 billion years to reach us has just been confirmed as the earliest galaxy found to date.
By studying the oxygen content of the galaxy with the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), astronomers have precisely dated it to just 367 million years after the Big Bang, a time when the first lights in the Universe were still switching on and starting to propagate freely through space.
The result confirms observations made by JWST, and offers new information about the early Universe that tells us about the origins of the elements.
"The first images of the James Webb Space Telescope revealed so many early galaxies that we felt we had to test its results using the best observatory on Earth," says astronomer Tom Bakx of Nagoya University in Japan.
"It was a very exciting time to be an observational astronomer, and we could track the status of the observations that will test the JWST results in real time."
The galaxy, named GHZ2/GLASS-z12, was first spotted by JWST in July of last year, not long after the telescope opened its segmented golden eye on the infrared light of the Universe.
A paper in November detailed the discovery, dating the galaxy back to approximately 350 million years after the Big Bang, which took place around 13.8 billion years ago.
That's actually pretty amazing, but any astronomical discovery is significantly more robust if it can be confirmed using an independent instrument.
So a team led by Bakx and astronomer Jorge Zavala of the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan turned to radio telescope ALMA to see what more they could learn about the fledgling galaxy.
They turned ALMA to the direction of GHZ2/GLASS-z12 and started looking for an emission signature on the radio spectrum associated with oxygen.
Since oxygen takes a relatively short time to form, it's commonly used to learn more about galaxies in the early Universe. And when light enters oxygen, it is re-emitted at a specific wavelength range, resulting in a brighter line on that part of the spectrum.
The image of GHZ2/GLASS-z12 with the associated ALMA spectrum. (NASA/ESA/CSA/T. Treu, UCLA/NAOJ/T. Bakx, Nagoya U)
Each of the 66 12-meter radio antennae that make up ALMA were put to work, ultimately detecting an oxygen emission line close to the position of GHZ2/GLASS-z12. Follow-up analyses and statistical tests determined that the signal was real, and related to the galaxy.
"We were initially concerned about the slight variation in position between the detected oxygen emission line and the galaxy seen by Webb," Bakx explains.
"But we performed detailed tests on the observations to confirm that this really is a robust detection, and it is very difficult to explain through any other interpretation."
The very slight distance between the galaxy and the oxygen emission could suggest that violent explosions or interactions stripped the galaxy of a great deal of its gas, blowing it out into intergalactic space.
The team dated their observations to a more precise 367 million years after the Big Bang. And, based on the brightness of the emission line, they were able to infer that the galaxy had relatively quickly formed high abundances of elements heavier than hydrogen and helium.
This is very interesting. The early Universe, before stars came along, was mostly made up of hydrogen with a smaller amount of helium. Then stars formed; in their hot, dense cores, they started smashing atoms together, creating heavier elements.
But these elements were locked inside the stars; it wasn't until the stars had died, exploding in spectacular supernovae, that heavier elements were able to spread through interstellar space.
This presence of oxygen so early in the Universe gives us some clues about the timing and evolution of these first stars, which we have yet to see directly.
"These deep ALMA observations provide robust evidence of the existence of galaxies within the first few hundred million years after the Big Bang, and confirms the surprising results from the Webb observations," Zavala says.
"The work of JWST has only just begun, but we are already adjusting our models of how galaxies form in the early Universe to match these observations. The combined power of Webb and the radio telescope array ALMA give us the confidence to push our cosmic horizons ever closer to the dawn of the Universe."
The research has been published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
To some degree you are right. But I would rather see money spent on projects like this than continually being spent on useless, lazy, and irresponsible people with no desire to better themselves by earning both what they want and what they need by working.
An explosion forces everything out from the point of the blast..
Look at how the universe has objects moving in multiple directions.
Not possible from a massive explosion or even a little one.
It’s a sham.
An explosion forces everything out from the point of the blast..
Look at how the universe has objects moving in multiple directions.
Not possible from a massive explosion or even a little one.
It’s a sham.
Perhaps, I suppose.
However, we can’t even get a consensus om the contrived nature of the Covid & vaccine scam and this is right in our face with people dying daily while the rich get richer and more powerful.
Whatever else happens, if the useless, lazy, and irresponsible occasionally vote, I expect they will continue to get theirs.
“stars form when enough dust gathers in one place.”
Huh? The article points out that the early universe had nothing but a lot of hydrogen and a bit of helium floating around. There were NO heavier elements that would comprise dust. Somehow the hydrogen and helium accreted to form a star and ignition started. Heavier elements were formed deep in the star. After the star went supernova at the end of its life, those heavier elements were distributed throughout the universe.
“stars form when enough dust gathers in one place”
Well then, there’s about to be a huge star burst underneath my sofa!
*grin*
There was no big bang, and the universe is not 14 billion years old, and there was something there before what we can ‘see’ or observe. That we can only ‘see’ at about 14 billion light years ago, does not mean that there isn’t something beyond.
And, it we see what occurred some 14 billion years ago, everything out that far is NOW dead or evolved into something different. We can’t observe what there is there now.
That galaxy went through a lot of trouble to be left alone, and we found it anyway.
It’s not either/ or. There’s tons of projects going on. Some using telescopes that are good for extreme distance, some using telescopes that aren’t.
Hah! Mine, too. I have enough separate areas to form a tiny galaxy.
There was supposed to be a sequel to that movie, but one of the main actors, Alan Rickman, died................
Fell off the Nakatome Tower.
And God saw everything that He had made, and behold, it was very good. Genesis 1:31
Indeed. Now, if they had said "... 367.428 million years..." we could be far more sure about their precision. ;-)
Why do stars fall down from the skyBut then as I read on:
Every time you walk by?
Just like me, they long to be
Close to you
On the day that you were born the angels got together
And decided to create a dream come true
So they sprinkled moon dust in your hair of gold
And starlight in your eyes of blue...
"The work of JWST has only just begun...
😆
Excellent work...
Educate yourself. The Big Bang was not an explosion. The Big Bang refers to the observation that on cosmic scales objects are all receding from earth, and furthermore the rate at which they are receding is directly proportional to their distance from earth. As you might expect there are objects that are traveling toward earth, or along tangential paths, but these are local objects that are gravitationally bound within our galaxy. Outside the galaxy, the situation is as I described— all galaxies are receding from us, with more distant ones receding faster.
Now you can believe the model or not, but at least get the details right and don’t argue against straw men. The Big Bang simply refers to the fact that if everything is currently receding from us, the best explanation for that is that the space (technically spacetime) between us and those other objects is expanding. This means that matter in the universe is becoming less dense over time, and that the universe is getting colder over time. Logically, then this implies that in the past the universe must have been more dense and hotter. This hot dense state is the origin of the Big Bang.
This state was hot enough that ordinary matter would not have existed. Matter would have formed via pair production from the energetic radiation that was dominate in the early universe. The first matter would not have been in the form of atoms but rather free electrons and quarks. The quarks combined into free protons and neutrons as the universe further expanded. These neutrons and protons combined to form helium nuclei, with most protons left free. Hence we get the primal abundance of hydrogen and helium predicted by the model - another observation explained by it.
This plasma was not transparent to electromagnetic radiation, which still permeated the universe. Even if stars had formed at this point, light from them would have been absorbed by the plasma comprising all the matter in the universe. As the universe cooled more though neutral atoms formed with the result that the universe became transparent. Therefore the radiation permeating the universe was free to travel everywhere within it. Well, that radiation is still permeating the universe. It is now much less energetic because of the cooling and expansion of space, so it no longer is gamma radiation or x-rays, but rather is microwave radiation- another observation predicted and explained by the model.
There are other more technical observations supporting the BB, but I’m not an astrophysicist so I’m not sure I can adequately explain them. The point though is that “There was no Big Bang because an explosion wouldn’t dlook like this” attempt to discredit the mode is really a lame and bogus argument. Please do educate yourself on the actual model, what it predicts and how well those predictions match actual observations. You might well learn something in the process and you might be less inclined to present overly simplistic arguments against scientific theories like the Big Bang
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