James Webb’s 10 most surprising scientific discoveries in 2023

The James Webb Telescope captures a large image of the Tarantula Galaxy

The best Christmas gift arrived for astronomers and enthusiasts two years ago, when on the morning of December 25, 2021 the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) was launched, the largest and most precise gift in the world in these devices that serve to scrutinize the first stars and galaxies of the universe, observe black holes, exoplanets and millions of objects in the fascinating cosmos.

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In 2023, this advanced space telescope completed a year of operation in space, offering impressive and scientifically valuable images of the universe. Here we examine the most important discoveries, scientific advances, and photographs from NASA’s largest observing instrument.

Disk galaxies in the early universe, structures that test our understanding of cosmic evolution NASA/ESA/CSA

Astronomers have always thought, regarding theories of the evolution of galaxies, that these massive stellar groups at the beginning of the universe were too young to have complex structures, such as spiral arms or rings. It was even thought that these structures began to appear about 6 billion years after the Big Bang. But this year, JWST found that galaxies with such delicate shapes could have existed as early as 3.7 billion years after the Big Bang.

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“Based on our results, astronomers need to reconsider our understanding of the formation of the first galaxies and how galaxy evolution occurred over the past 10 billion years,” said study co-author Christopher Conselice, professor of astronomy at University of Manchester in 2019. United Kingdom.

Leonardo Ferreira of the University of Victoria, lead author of the study, paid tribute to JWST’s role in changing our understanding of galactic development, saying: “The fact that this telescope finds so many disk galaxies is another sign of the power of this tool, and this helped us correct ideas that we considered correct.” “We now know that structures form earlier in the universe, much earlier than anyone had predicted,” he concluded.

NASA confirmed the discovery of a jet stream on Jupiter through the Webb telescope. This jet stream moves at speeds of up to 515 km/h, exceeding the speed of the strongest winds on Earth. (JAR)

As if it were a super-powerful scanner, the James Webb focuses on planets in our cosmic vicinity, giving us key information on the developments of several distant worlds little visited by human instruments.

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Although the JWST’s goal is to see some of the universe’s first stars and galaxies, its new look at our solar system was impressive. In October it revealed a high-speed jet stream on Jupiter that had never been seen before despite being more than 4,800 kilometers wide and traveling at about 515 km/h.

An atmospheric jet stream, or jet stream, is a climate phenomenon characterized by the presence of strong winds concentrated in a long, narrow band in a planet’s atmosphere. These currents are the product of the meeting between air masses of different temperatures.

This June 2023 image provided by the Space Telescope Science Institute shows the planet Saturn and three of its moons (Enceladus, Tethys, and Dione) captured by the James Webb Space Telescope. In the infrared, the planet appears dark because sunlight is absorbed by methane in the atmosphere. (NASA, ESA, CSA, JWST Saturn Team via AP)

The space observatory also offered a new look at Saturn, capturing the gas giant’s delicate ring system and three of its 146 known moons. And in June, JWST identified carbon dioxide for the first time in the salty liquid oceans of Europa, Jupiter’s icy moon.

The gas giant is eerily dark when viewed through JWST’s infrared eyes, because at this wavelength “methane gas absorbs nearly all of the sunlight that hits the atmosphere,” according to NASA.

The powerful observatory also captured a stunning image of Uranus, 9 of its 27 brightest moons and 11 of its 13 known rings in December.

Pioneering discoveries published in The Astrophysical Journal shed light on a mysterious dark region at the center of the Milky Way, nicknamed “The Brick” due to its opacity (NASA)

NASA’s powerful James Webb Space Telescope, located 1.5 million kilometers from Earth, managed to observe an ancient galaxy, very difficult to focus with ground-based telescopes, appearing and disappearing from view.

This is the AzTECC71 galaxy, born just 900 million years after the Big Bang, when the universe rotated on its first stars, absolute eons and billions before the birth of our Solar System.

“The fact that even something so extreme is barely visible in the most sensitive images from our new telescope is very exciting to me. This potentially tells us that there is an entire population of galaxies hiding from us,” said astronomer Jed McKinney, of the University of Texas, author of the scientific study published with the news in the Astrophysical Journal.

According to NASA (REUTERS) the exoplanet K2-18 b is 8.6 times more massive than Earth and has habitable conditions

120 light years from Earth, in the constellation Leo, there is an exoplanet called K2-18 b that orbits the cool red dwarf star K2-18 in its habitable zone. Although this world was discovered in 2019, James Webb’s observations provided more information about its possible habitability.

K2-18 b, which is intermediate in size between Earth and Neptune. And its atmosphere contains carbon-carrying molecules, such as methane and carbon dioxide. Added to this is the detection, although not yet confirmed, of a molecule called dimethyl sulfide (DMS). On our planet the main source of DMS is marine phytoplankton, which could suggest, if confirmed, the presence of life forms similar to those on Earth.

The next steps will involve further observations with the James Webb Telescope to obtain precise data on the exoplanet. In this tone, Nikku Madhusudhan, an astronomer at the University of Cambridge, said: “Our ultimate goal is the identification of life on a habitable exoplanet, which would transform our understanding of our place in the Universe.”

The James Webb Space Telescope is the most important observatory in the world. (photo: Future technology)

In August, the JWST observed in the photograph a small dot, 13.4 billion years old, which was one of the first galaxies in the Universe, the oldest ever observed by humanity. And it is 70 million years younger than the oldest known star system, JADES-GS-z13-0.

Scientists have nicknamed it the Maisie Galaxy and it is named after the daughter of Steven Finkelstein, a professor of astronomy at the University of Texas and principal investigator of the Cosmic Evolution Early Release Science Survey (CEERS) study.

The Maisie Galaxy, the most distant galaxy ever observed (NASA)

Initially, the CEERS team determined that the formation of the Maisie Galaxy occurred about 366 million years after the Big Bang because, to determine its age, they measured the light in the images through filters of different frequencies (photometry).

But later experts did an analysis with the Webb spectroscopic instrument, which dated its origin to about 390 million years after the Big Bang.

To calculate the distance of the galaxy from Earth, the researchers looked at the red light emitted, since the redshift is urgent when the wavelength of the light is stretched. When a celestial object moves rapidly away from our planet, the light has to travel a longer distance and this causes the wavelength of the light to lengthen, causing a shift towards the red end of the spectrum.

It lives at the center of the CEERS 1019 galaxy, which existed 570 million years after the Big Bang (ESA/Webb, NASA & CSA)

Astronomers have long suspected that smaller black holes must have formed in the early days of the universe, but the JWST observations are the first to observe them in such detail.

There is a galaxy that hosts the ancient black hole, CEERS 1019, which formed quite early in the history of the universe, just 570 million years after the Big Bang.

The active supermassive black hole at the center of CEERS 1019 is unusual not only because of its age and distance, but also because it weighs only 9 million solar masses, meaning it is 9 million times heavier than our Sun. the universe primordial weighs more than 1 billion solar masses, making them brighter and easier to detect.

“Webb is the first observatory capable of capturing them so clearly. “We now think that lower-mass black holes could be everywhere, waiting to be discovered,” said astronomer Dale Kocevski of Colby College in Waterville, who has studied this extraordinary space object.

The James Webb Space Telescope has revealed an image containing the most distant and oldest globular clusters ever discovered in space (NASA)

In June, an international team of astronomers detected complex organic molecules in a primordial galaxy (one of the earliest known) using NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope. These are tangles of enormous organic complexes drifting through a distant galaxy, located 12 billion light-years from Earth, or 3.8 billion parsecs.

The discovery of the molecules, familiar on Earth in the form of smoke, soot and smog, demonstrates Webb’s power to help understand the complex chemistry that goes hand in hand with the birth of new stars, even in the earliest periods. of the universe. At least when it comes to galaxies, the new discoveries cast doubt on the old adage that “where there’s smoke, there’s fire.”

The galaxy, known as SPT0418-47, lies behind another, closer galaxy. The intermediate galaxy’s gravity bends and distorts light from SPT0418-47, making it about 30 times brighter than it would appear, an effect called gravitational lensing.

The dust is so thick on this star that not even the near-infrared light detected by Webb can penetrate it (NASA)

The golden compound eye of the most powerful space observatory ever built has provided a new view of a star seen exploding just 36 years ago. It was February 23, 1987 when SN 1987A emitted a maximum brightness that has been studied year after year by the astronomical community.

But James Webb also wanted the opportunity to do so, taking advantage of his powerful infrared vision, which revealed never-before-seen structures in the growing cloud of exploded stellar guts.

“The image reveals a central keyhole-like structure, with a center filled with lumpy gas and dust ejected from the supernova explosion. The dust is so dense that not even the near-infrared light detected by Webb can penetrate it, forming the keyhole black hole,” NASA explained. Evidence suggests it hides the remains of the exploded star, now a type of neutron star known as a pulsar.

The James Webb Space Telescope captures images of the Orion Nebula

New observations with the James Webb Space Telescope published in September confirmed the precision of the expansion rate of the universe measured by its predecessor, Hubble.

The speed at which the universe expands, known as the Hubble constant, is one of the fundamental parameters for understanding the evolution and final destiny of the cosmos. But at this time, model estimates for the Hubble constant do not agree with values ​​based on telescopic observations.

This year, JWST observed a class of stars known as Cepheid variables, which are typically gigantic stars about 100,000 times brighter than the Sun and the most reliable source for measuring cosmic distances (and thus for revealing the rate of expansion of the Sun in the ‘universe). . But instead of resolving the debate, the JWST data only deepened the ongoing thinking about the Hubble constant.

“I don’t care what the value of the Hubble constant is. “I want to understand why our best instruments, our gold standard instruments, don’t agree with each other,” said Adam Riess, an astronomer at Johns Hopkins University and winner of the 2011 Nobel Prize in physics.

Artistic recreation of water vapor in the planetary forming disk (NASA)

Water everywhere. Not in drops, but as vapor. Scientists working with NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope to revolutionize the international astronomical field have now discovered this vital element: the disks from which future planets will be born.

Using the Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI) on NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, scientists discovered water near the center of the planet-forming disk of gas and dust surrounding PDS 70, in the form of hot vapor at a temperature of about 330 degrees C. “Our result shows that water is present in the inner disk of this iconic system where Earth-like planets could gather,” said Giulia Perotti, an astrophysicist at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg, in Germany.

In the study published in Nature, the researchers focused on the young star PDS 70, located about 370 light-years from Earth and where these planets are forming nearby.

2023-12-30 03:41:00
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