With the aid The Space James Webba Way Team of Astronomers broke the record of the oldest, most distant galaxy detected by people.
In pre -relief examinationStill awaiting review and publication in the magazine, astronomers describe this primitive galaxy, giving it the name Mom Z14. According to the researchers’ calculations, this “miracle” was created 280 million years after the Substantial Bang, beating the record set by the discovery last year Jades-GS-Z14-0, the galaxy created 290 million years after the origin of the universe.
To place these measurements in the context, the current age of the universe is estimated at 13.8 billion years. The land is approximate the age of 4.543 billion years. Nobody expected that James Webb’s space telescope would be able to observe things so close to a century to a large explosion just three and a half years after launching.
A brief reminder of distances in relation to space -time. Because the featherlight travels at a speed of 300,000 meters per second, and because the space expands, observing the featherlight from very distant objects is equivalent to see what they are a long time ago. For example, when we say that my mother Z14 is about 13.5 billion years venerable, it means that you will have to travel 13.5 billion years at the speed of featherlight to reach it. So far, there is no sense detected by the scientific instrument further, and at the same time older than this.
James Webb Space Telescope, with its ability to a depth of distant space, allows us to examine some aspects of the universe in the early stages. How does it do it? By infrared sensors. Because of the expansion of the universe, almost all galaxies we see from the ground move away from us. So, from our point of view, their featherlight seems to have a longer wavelength because it is stretched by this move. We call it “shift to red“Their wavelengths are red because they are longer, and therefore they change towards the red end of the featherlight spectrum. The earlier the object was created, and thus further, expanding outside for a long time, the greater the shift towards the red.
James Webb’s space telescope was able to determine that Mom Z14 is 50 times smaller than the Milky Way, and also detected the presence of nitrogen and coal in the galaxy. This is significant, because despite the importance of 280 million years older than a great explosion, it shows that Mom Z14 does not belong to the first generation of galaxies, because the stars in these galaxies would be made only of hydrogen and helium, elements that mainly constituted the early universe. Heavier elements arrived only laterAfter produced in the stars.
Can James Webb cross this threshold and find the first generation of galaxies? Such discoveries can be far away, but we must look.
This story originally appeared Wired In Spanish and was translated from Spanish.