Three new candidate galaxies, which look like fuzzy red dots, discovered in images collected by NASA's James Webb Space Telescope. One of these galaxies, left, may have contained as many stars as the modern-day Milky Way, but was 30 times more compact in size. Credits: NASA, ESA, CSA, I. Labbe (Swinburne University of Technology). Image processing: G. Brammer(哥本哈根大学尼尔斯玻尔研究所宇宙黎明中心).
In a new study, 一个由天体物理学家组成的国际团队发现了隐藏在詹姆斯·韦伯太空望远镜图像中的几个神秘物体:六个潜在的星系，它们在宇宙历史的早期就出现了，而且它们的质量如此之大，在当前的宇宙学理论下是不可能存在的.
每一个候选星系都可能存在于宇宙大爆炸后大约5亿到7亿年的宇宙之初, or more than 13 billion years ago. 它们也非常巨大，包含的恒星几乎和现在的银河系一样多.
“It’s bananas,” said Erica Nelson, 这项新研究的合著者，博彩平台推荐天体物理学助理教授. “你只是不希望早期的宇宙能够这么快地组织起来. These galaxies should not have had time to form.”
Nelson and her colleagues, 包括澳大利亚斯威本科技大学的第一作者Ivo labb
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詹姆斯·韦伯收集的北斗七星附近空间区域的马赛克, 插图显示了宇宙诞生之初六个新候选星系的位置. Credits: NASA, ESA, CSA, I. Labbe (Swinburne University of Technology). Image processing: G. Brammer(哥本哈根大学尼尔斯玻尔研究所宇宙黎明中心).
Artist's depiction of the James Webb Space Telescope. (Credit: NASA GSFC/CIL/Adriana Manrique Gutierrez)
最新的发现并不是詹姆斯·韦伯观测到的最早的星系 launched in December 2021 and is the most powerful telescope ever sent into space. Last year, another team of scientists spotted several galaxies 它们可能是在宇宙大爆炸后大约3.5亿年由气体凝聚而成的. Those objects, however, were downright shrimpy compared to the new galaxies, containing many times less mass from stars.
研究人员还需要更多的数据来证实这些星系的大小, and date as far back in time, as they appear. Their preliminary observations, however, 让博彩平台推荐有机会了解詹姆斯·韦伯如何改写天文学教科书.
“另一种可能性是，这些东西是一种不同类型的奇怪物体, such as faint quasars, which would be just as interesting,” she said.
Fuzzy dots
There’s a lot of excitement going around: In 2022, Nelson and her colleagues, who hail from the United States, Australia, Denmark and Spain, 成立了一个特别小组来调查詹姆斯·韦伯发回地球的数据.
Their recent findings stem from the telescope’s Cosmic Evolution Early Release Science (CEERS) Survey. 这些图像深入观察了北斗七星附近的一片天空——一个相对乏味的地方, at least at first glance, 哈勃太空望远镜在20世纪90年代首次观测到的太空区域.
当尼尔森盯着一张邮票大小的图片时，她发现了一些奇怪的东西:几个“模糊的光点”，看起来太亮了，不像是真的.
“They were so red and so bright,” Nelson said. “We weren’t expecting to see them.”
She explained that in astronomy, red light usually equals old light. The universe, Nelson said, has been expanding since the dawn of time. As it expands, galaxies and other celestial objects move farther apart, 它们发出的光向外延伸——把它想象成宇宙中的盐水太妃糖. The more the light stretches, the redder it looks to human instruments. (Light from objects coming closer to Earth, in contrast, looks bluer).
研究小组进行了计算，发现他们的老星系也很大, 拥有数百亿到数千亿颗太阳大小的恒星, on par with the Milky Way.
然而，这些原始星系可能与博彩平台推荐的星系没有太多共同之处.
“银河系每年大约形成一到两颗新恒星，”尼尔森说. “在整个宇宙历史中，其中一些星系每年必须形成数百颗新恒星.”
尼尔森和她的同事们想用詹姆斯·韦伯来收集更多博彩app推荐这些神秘物体的信息, but they’ve seen enough already to pique their curiosity. For a start, 计算表明，当时不应该有足够多的正常物质——构成行星和人体的那种物质——能够如此迅速地形成如此多的恒星.
“If even one of these galaxies is real, it will push against the limits of our understanding of cosmology,” Nelson said.
Seeing back in time
For Nelson, 这一新发现是她从小学开始的一段旅程的高潮. When she was 10, she wrote a report about Hubble, a telescope that launched in 1990 and is still active today. Nelson was hooked.
“It takes time for light to go from a galaxy to us, 这意味着当你看这些物体的时候，你是在回顾过去,” she said. “我发现这个概念非常令人兴奋，所以我在那一刻决定，这就是我一生想要做的事情.”
纳尔逊说，詹姆斯·韦伯的快速发现与哈勃望远镜早期的发现非常相似. At the time, 许多科学家认为，直到宇宙大爆炸后数十亿年，星系才开始形成. 但研究人员很快发现，早期的宇宙比他们想象的要复杂得多，也令人兴奋得多.
“Even though we learned our lesson already from Hubble, 博彩平台推荐仍然没有想到詹姆斯·韦伯能在这么久远的时间里看到如此成熟的星系,” Nelson said. “I’m so excited.”
Other co-authors on the new study include Pieter van Dokkum of Yale University; Rachel Bezanson of the University of Pittsburgh; Katherine Suess of the University of California, Santa Cruz; Joel Leja, Elijah Matthews and Bingjie Wang of the Pennsylvania State University; Gabriel Brammer and Katherine Whitaker of the University of Coppenhagen; and Mauro Stefanon of the University of Valencia.
