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An international team of researchers analyzed the deepest images captured by the space telescope James Webb and discovered that the early universe – the oldest – harbors many more galaxies, much brighter and smaller than expected.
Led by Pablo G. Pérez-González, from the Center for Astrobiology (CAB), CSIC-INTA, and carried out by researchers from eight European countries and the United States, the work presents the results of the study of the most distant galaxies in the universe obtained with data from the NIRCam instrument on the James Webb telescope.
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Details of the research have been published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.
For the research, the team took data from an area of the sky known as the Hubble Ultra-deep Field, an area that the Hubble telescope could not access and that can now be explored thanks to the MIRI instrument on James Webbcapable of working in the mid-infrared and observing cold or very distant objects.
The team also made observations with the instrument NIRCam, Webb’s most sensitive camera, which allowed them to detect some of the most distant galaxies observed to date, 10 times fainter than those that had been studied during the first 6 months of the mission.
Using those observations, the team found 44 galaxies that would have formed in the first 500 million years of the Universeless than 4% of their current age, they even present some candidate formed in the first 200 million years of the universe, 1% of the age.
The team compared the properties of these early galaxies with what was predicted by the most advanced galaxy formation models and made by the world’s most powerful supercomputers.
“For decades simulations of the universe have been developed that have studied how galaxies are formed, when the first stars appear, how the primordial gas, which was only hydrogen and helium, is converted into other elements, such as oxygen or carbon, and how, ultimately, the fundamental ingredients of life are created”explains Luca Costantin, CAB researcher and co-author of the article.
The study concludes that the primordial galaxies created 10 times more ultraviolet photons than the models predicted, but “the key is how,” says Pablo G. Pérez-González.
Ultraviolet photons can be created by hot, young stars, much hotter than the Sun, but they can also be created by supermassive black holes..
The article explains that the discovered primordial galaxies are also very compact, 2-3 times more than expected, which could be linked to the presence of these black holes.
“For now, James Webb is providing us with many more questions than answers, but these new lines of research are exciting”conclude the authors of the article.
Source: Elcomercio
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