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Some images and data collected by the James Webb Space Telescope with subject the moon of Saturn, Titan. It was an important moment as it was a long time since scientists were “curious” to have the opportunity to observe this celestial object with the potential offered by the new scientific instrument. But JWST extension it’s also meant to look much further! And one of the latest news concerns the collection of data galaxies born about 400 million years after the Big Bang.
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It is not the first time that Webb has been employed to observe celestial objects so old and so far away, thus making it possible to exploit his ability to capture even the faintest emissions of infrared rays which reach the Earth after billions of years (and distances of billions of light years). At the end of August 2022 we wrote about Maisie that it would have formed about 290 million years after the Big Bang and now the new observations allow us to deepen the analysis of the early Universe.
The James Webb Space Telescope and ancient galaxies
According to what is reported from the NASA the galaxies covered by this study would have been born when the Universe was about 400 million years while the light took 13.4 billion years to reach the JWST extension (ie 2% of the age of the Universe). The scientists of the international team have thus confirmed that indeed the previously analyzed galaxies indeed are “old” and distant and it is not an error in the analysis.
Emma Curtis-Lake (University of Hertfordshire in the UK) he said “Seeing the spectrum revealed as we’d hoped confirmed that these galaxies are indeed at the edge of our view, some further away than Hubble could see! It’s an extremely exciting outcome for the mission.”. There is also a little bit of Italy in the international team with Stefano Carniani (Scuola Normale Superiore of Pisa) which he added “these are by far the faintest infrared spectra ever captured. They reveal what we hoped to see: a precise measurement at the limit of the wavelength of light due to intergalactic hydrogen scattering”.
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Instruments were used to capture this kind of emissions NIR Cam (Near-Infrared Camera, near infrared) and the NIRS spec (Near Infrared Spectrograph). The search for this type of information was one of the foundations for the creation of the James Webb Space Telescope also giving rise to the program JADES (acronym of JWST Advanced Deep Extragalactic Survey). The observations will last about a month overall even if they will be spread over two years.
Scientists pointed the space telescope at the area where Hubble had previously scanned the sky to create theUltra Deep Field (Scientists will also observe the Hubble Deep Field in 2023). Webb started remarks with NIR Cam for 10 days with nine different filters covering an area fifteen times larger than what Hubble had observed. In particular, in the images released, the light at 1.15 µm (115 W filter) has been assigned blue, the light at 2.0 µm (filter 200 W) has been assigned green and while red has been assigned to 4.44 µm (444 W filter).
We then moved on to NIRS spec which was spent about three days collecting the emissions of 250 distant galaxies. This allowed us to accurately measure the redshift (redshift) of these galaxies also allowing to have indications on the gases contained and on the stellar typology present. Four of the observed galaxies have redshift above 10 and in this group, two have redshift greater than 13. This means that it is light from objects that were present when the Universe was 330 million years old. While the images are not as pleasing to the eye as those of other celestial objects seen in the past (e.g. i “pillars of creation”) for scientists it is a veritable mine of data. For those wishing to deepen the analyzes conducted for the creation of these images, two studies entitled have also been published Discovery and properties of the earliest galaxies with confirmed distances And Spectroscopy of four metal-poor galaxies beyond redshift ten.
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