NASA declined to rename the telescope after conducting an investigation into Webb’s career, the agency told CNN. She told CNN that Webb’s name and legacy are “overshadowing what should be a story about an amazing feat of human engineering.” ![]() The name of such a revolutionary telescope should “be a reflection of our highest values,” a group of four astronomers wrote in Scientific American earlier this year.Ĭhanda Prescod-Weinstein, assistant professor of physics and core faculty in women’s and gender studies at the University of New Hampshire, co-authored the Scientific American piece. Now that they've made their initial observations of GS-9209, the researchers plan to study the galaxy in more detail with the European Southern Observatory's Extremely Large Telescope (ELT) - which is scheduled to make its first observations in 2028.The Webb telescope is about to take an unprecedented look at these intriguing exoplanets "This is basically the only process that we think is capable of injecting enough energy into the galaxy's gas over a short space of time to either heat it up such that it doesn't collapse to form anymore stars, or to completely clear the galaxy out of star-forming gas." "If you have a massive black hole and stuff is falling into it, that leads to a lot of energy radiating out from that accretion," Carnall said. Quasars are giant black holes with an enormous quantity of material circling their maws, which heats up enough to push gas clouds away with blasts of light up to a trillion times more luminous than the brightest stars. ![]() The black hole at GS-9209's center likely grew large enough to become a quasar. These black holes are born from the collapse of giant stars and grow by ceaselessly gorging on gas, dust, stars and other black holes. "The emerging picture is that at the highest redshifts galaxies are capable of forming more of the available gas into stars."įollowing this burst of activity, the researchers think GS-9209 was abruptly shut down by a supermassive black hole lurking at its heart. This result and some others are beginning to point now to that ratio being a bit higher in the early universe," Carnall said. "Typically, the galaxies we see today have had access to about five times as much gas or more than they formed stars. James Webb Space Telescope hit by large micrometeoroid 19 jaw-dropping James Webb Space Telescope images The James Webb Telescope detected the coldest ice in the known universe - and it contains the building blocks of life These factors combined to cause the stars to ignite at a much faster rate, and at a higher efficiency, than in the present-day universe. The frenzy of star formation was a result of the rapid collapse of the giant gas cloud that became the galaxy and the turbulent conditions of the early universe, the researchers said. Then, 800 million years after the Big Bang, the ancient galaxy abruptly went quiet. Over a cosmically brief 200 million years, the galaxy served up enough piping-hot stars to match the present-day Milky Way's 40 billion solar masses’ worth. Studying GS-9209 with the JWST revealed that the distant galaxy roared into life 600 million years after the Big Bang with an enormous burst of star formation. The $10 billion space observatory was designed to read the earliest chapters of the universe's history in its faintest glimmers of light - picked up by the telescope’s infrared sensors - after being stretched out from billions of years of travel across the expanding fabric of space-time. But the infrared wavelengths needed to gauge the galaxy's distance are dampened by Earth's atmosphere, so scientists needed a very powerful space telescope to study its age.Įnter the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). In the last five years, astronomers have used ground-based telescopes to study the galaxy’s various wavelengths of emitted light, flagging it as a galaxy that had potentially been quenched. Scientists first spotted GS-9209 in the early 2000s.
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