2023-07-11 00:30:18
The Early Universe Research Project Cosmic Evolution Earley Release Science (CEERS) using the capabilities of the James Webb Space Telescope finally shows its results. Months of monitoring the furthest reaches of the visible universe were used to create a short but impressive visualization summarizing a journey through five thousand 3D galaxies into the past.
The video corresponds to the Extended Groth Strip, a small region of the firmament that is located in the middle of the constellations Ursa Major and Bootes. The line has 100,000 identified galaxies, but the visualization built by the Space Telescope Science Institute only takes 5% of them as a reference.
As the user advances in the video, they can observe more distant galaxies and therefore go back in time until they reach the earliest stages of the universe. Let us remember that the information from the early universe is, right now, present and available to the extent that we have sufficiently sophisticated light-gathering instruments. Light has a finite speed of 3,000 km/s. Therefore, to observe an object that is one light year away is to observe what that object was like a year ago. More precisely, it is to observe the light that that object emitted or reflected a year ago. Instruments capable of picking up light from objects thousands of light-years away are literally looking at what those objects looked like millennia ago. According to NASA annotations, each second of the video is equivalent to traveling 200 million light years. It is equivalent, therefore, to “seeing 200 million more years in the past.”
The display ends with the Galaxia Masie, one of the furthest we know. It was formed only 390 million years following the universal expansion event known as the Big Bang, in the reionization period. During this stage, considered as transitory, the radiation of the first stars (which are presumed to be enormous) ionized the neutral hydrogen, separating the electrons from the protons. That ionized gas blanketed the universe to make it the colorful, luminous cosmos we can now perceive.
CEERS was created to take the instruments of James Webb and push them to their limits. The discoveries of the research project are celebrated twice over. On the one hand, the encounter with a new galaxy or early star is celebrated, on the other hand it is recognized that the most advanced space telescope in the world was able to go beyond the limit set years ago.
Sonification: another way of ver and understand the universe
How to make images of space accessible to those who cannot see? Convert celestial data into sound compositions.
“This observatory (the James Webb) just opens up this whole period of time for us to study. Before, we mightn’t study galaxies like Maisie’s because we mightn’t see them. Now we can not only find them in our images, but we can also find out what they are made of and if they differ from the galaxies we see nearby,” said Rebecca Larson, a CEERS research fellow.
The period of the reionization of the universe remains a mystery to the scientific community. As the CEERS astronomers themselves have reported, to investigate how galaxies evolved during the early years of the universe, images of celestial bodies located hundreds of millions of light years away were lacking. Getting that kind of information was impossible for the Hubble telescope launched into orbit in 1990, but not for the James Webb with 30 years of scientific breakthrough installed inside it.
The same project recently found the most distant active supermassive black hole in time. CEERS 1019 is located in the galaxy of the same name and scientists determined that it existed only 570 million years following the Big Bang.
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#animation #NASA #WIRED
