Galaxies (NASA)
NASA’s James Webb Telescope made another amazing discovery: It has shown that the galaxies transformed the very nature of the universe in its infancy.
Since it launched at the end of 2021, the world has been wowed by a seemingly unending supply of new discoveries, new knowledge about the very nature of the universe from NASA’s James Webb Telescope. From newly discovered planets whose nature is like nothing ever seen before, to clearer images of faraway galaxies, Webb has lived up to the hype.
According to NASA, in the early universe, the gas between stars and galaxies was opaque and energetic starlight could not penetrate it. But 1 billion years after the big bang, the gas had become completely transparent.
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The big question that NASA needed to answer about this was why? What changed? Well, new data from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope shoed us why: The galaxies’ stars emitted enough light to heat and ionize the gas around them, clearing our collective view over hundreds of millions of years.
The results, from a research team led by Simon Lilly of ETH Zürich in Switzerland, are the newest insights about a time period known as the Era of Reionization, when the universe underwent dramatic changes. After the big bang, gas in the universe was incredibly hot and dense. Over hundreds of millions of years, the gas cooled. Then, the universe hit “repeat.” The gas again became hot and ionized – likely due to the formation of early stars in galaxies, and over millions of years, became transparent.
Researchers have long sought definitive evidence to explain these transformations, explained NASA, adding that the new results “effectively pull back the curtain at the end of this reionization period.”
“Not only does Webb clearly show that these transparent regions are found around galaxies, we’ve also measured how large they are,” explained Daichi Kashino of Nagoya University in Japan, the lead author of the team’s first paper. “With Webb’s data, we are seeing galaxies reionize the gas around them.”
These regions of transparent gas are gigantic compared to the galaxies – imagine a hot air balloon with a pea suspended inside. Webb’s data shows that these relatively tiny galaxies drove reionization, clearing massive regions of space around them. Over the next hundred million years, these transparent “bubbles” continued to grow larger and larger, eventually merging and causing the entire universe to become transparent.
Until now, researchers didn’t have this definitive evidence of what caused reionization – before Webb, they weren’t certain precisely what was responsible.
What do these galaxies look like? “They are more chaotic than those in the nearby universe,” explained Jorryt Matthee, also of ETH Zürich and the lead author of the team’s second paper. “Webb shows they were actively forming stars and must have been shooting off many supernovae. They had quite an adventurous youth!”
The James Webb Space Telescope is the world’s premier space science observatory. Webb will solve mysteries in our solar system, look beyond to distant worlds around other stars, and probe the mysterious structures and origins of our universe and our place in it. Webb is an international program led by NASA with its partners, ESA (European Space Agency) and the Canadian Space Agency.
