The James Webb Space Telescope is a fantastic instrument. It allows us to see far into the distance and time of space. This observatory can peer close to the edge of the observable universe, which means it can “see” the cosmos in its initial stages.
The problem arose when analyses of the telescope's images revealed galaxies too bright and massive for a primordial universe.
A new explanation for the mystery. A recent study published in The Astronomical Journal explains one of the mysteries of these first years of the Webb Telescope's activity. The answer lies in black holes and how they accelerate the matter that orbits them in their accretion disks.
So old, so bright. The mystery began with the release of the first image taken by the Webb Telescope, which contained the most distant galaxies ever seen.
While studying this image and the associated data, some astronomers realized something was wrong: Some galaxies were too luminous. This high luminosity would indicate that they were massive galaxies, too huge to have formed in the initial stages of the universe, a few hundred million years after the Big Bang.
Don’t discard the model. These observations challenged the “standard model” of cosmology conventionally used by the scientific community: Something didn’t add up. This is usually bittersweet news since it’s often through the cracks in a model that scientists can work towards creating a better one.
But this may not be the case.
Black holes. The new explanation for this brightness isn’t the galaxy’s mass but the densest objects imaginable: black holes. According to the new hypothesis, these bright galaxies contain black holes that consume vast amounts of gas.
The enormous acceleration these particles undergo may cause them to emit light and heat, light that would be responsible for “illuminating” these galaxies. Furthermore, it's a light that may combine with the one emitted by the galaxy’s stars to create these ultraluminous points.
Little red dots. As a result, astronomers have dubbed these galaxies “little red dots” in observations. In this new work, astronomers have analyzed the primordial galaxies in which they’ve ruled out these “anomalous” observations, presumably caused by black holes.
By eliminating these “little red dots,” the sample began to resemble what we’d expect from this early universe.
There’s no crisis, but mysteries remain. Astronomers still have a mystery that has less to do with the size of primordial galaxies but rather their number: There are too many. Researchers have found more than twice as many of these types galaxies as expected in the young universe.
“We are still seeing more galaxies than predicted, although none of them are so massive that they ‘break’ the universe,” Katherine Chworowsky, who led the team responsible for the new research, said in a press release.
For now, the question remains unanswered. “Maybe in the early universe, galaxies were better at turning gas into stars,” Chworowsky speculated.
Image | Flickr (NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope)
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