As of: January 21, 2024, 6:13 a.m
By: Tanja Banner
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Researchers discover a type of light in the early universe that shouldn't be visible.
Thanks to the “James Webb” telescope, the mystery has now been solved.
Cambridge - Since the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has been in space and looked deep into the universe, it has been able to solve several mysteries - and also raise new questions.
Now the JWST has solved “one of the most puzzling questions” in space, as researcher Callum Witten reports.
It's about a certain type of light that researchers discovered in the early universe - but which shouldn't actually be visible, at least according to the current theory.
It's about the discovery of light from hydrogen atoms in the very early universe.
“It should have been completely blocked by the original neutral gas that formed after the Big Bang,” emphasizes Witten, who researches at the University of Cambridge and worked with a team to get to the bottom of the mystery.
The research group's study was published in the journal
Nature Astronomy
.
"Many hypotheses have been proposed to explain the large escape of this 'unexplained' emission," said the researcher.
How could it be that light from the very early universe could be observed today?
An artist's impression of the James Webb Space Telescope in space.
© Adriana Manrique Gutierrez/dpa
JWST sees many small galaxies where Hubble only sees one large one
Witten's research team discovered the answer through the “James Webb” telescope, in which both the US space organization Nasa and the European Esa are involved.
Because JWST saw several smaller galaxies where the Hubble telescope could only resolve one large galaxy.
“'Webb' sees a cluster of smaller interacting galaxies, and this revelation has furthered our understanding of the unexpected hydrogen emission from some of the first
galaxies are strongly influenced,” explains co-author Sergio Martin-Alvarez (Stanford University).
These images from the Webb Space Telescope show the galaxy EGSY8p7, which exhibits the unusual light emission.
© ESA/Webb, NASA & CSA, S. Finkelstein (UT Austin), M. Bagley (UT Austin), R. Larson (UT Austin), A. Pagan (STScI), C. Witten, M. Zamani (ESA/ Webb)
After this finding, computer simulations were used to further research the physical processes.
The team led by Witten and Martin-Alvarez found that as galaxies merged, stellar mass accumulated quickly - which led to strong hydrogen emission and made it easier for this radiation to escape.
For the research team, the high merger rate of the smaller galaxies observed for the first time can convincingly explain the riddle of the “inexplicable” hydrogen emission - and a mystery has been solved.
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