The James Webb Space Telescope has been doing some pretty astonishing things since its launch:
Way out there — a million miles from Earth — that telescope is still just doing its thing:
Looking deep into the early universe with NASA's James Webb Space Telescope, astronomers have found something unprecedented: a galaxy [Galaxy 9422] with an odd light signature, which they attribute to its gas outshining its stars.
Now, you might hear about a galaxy whose "gas outshines its stars" and be like:
But there's actually a huge significance to this:
Working together, their team found that computer models of cosmic gas clouds heated by very hot, massive stars, to an extent that the gas shone brighter than the stars, was nearly a perfect match to Webb's observations.
'It looks like these stars must be much hotter and more massive than what we see in the local universe, which makes sense because the early universe was a very different environment,' said Katz, of Oxford and the University of Chicago.
In effect, this impossibly distant galaxy is giving us a peek back into the tumultuous workings of the early universe. And it's pretty incredible what that looked like.
Normally, in our area of the cosmos, "typical hot, massive stars have a temperature ranging between 70,000 to 90,000 degrees Fahrenheit." Far away, however, things are a bit different:
According to the team, galaxy 9422 has stars hotter than 140,000 degrees Fahrenheit.
The data are surprising in other ways: The star signatures don't conform to what scientists would expect from that ancient era of the universe. The "exotic stars in this galaxy could be a guide for understanding how galaxies transitioned from primordial stars to the types of galaxies we already know."
Lots of unanswered questions abound:
Are these conditions common in galaxies at this time period, or a rare occurrence? What more can they tell us about even earlier phases of galaxy evolution?
We look forward to the James Webb Space Telescope answering these questions!
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