James Webb Captures Distant Spiral Galaxy Like Ours – 02/15/2023 – Science

In the unfathomable darkness and time that is the universe, each star is an omen of hope, a promise of life and shelter, like the lights of a distant ship on a cold sea.

And so, courtesy of the James Webb Space Telescope, here is yet another reminder of nature’s fecundity and bounty: thousands of galaxies, trillions of stars and innumerable planets, an unlimited realm of possibilities stretching back 13 billion years in one tiny piece. from the sky in the constellation of Hercules.

At the bottom center is a spiral galaxy known as Leda 2046648. It looks like a dead copy of the large Andromeda galaxy, M31, or its twin, our own galaxy, the Milky Way—except that the LEDA galaxy is 1 billion light-years away. from distance.

A billion years ago, when the light in this image was emitted, the first multicellular organisms appeared on Earth and were groping their way up the evolutionary ladder towards plants, fish, dinosaurs, humans and whatever came next.

One of the primary missions of the Webb Telescope is to explore the era when the first stars and galaxies began to illuminate the universe. Webb’s secret sauce is its ability to detect infrared rays, or electromagnetic radiation of wavelengths longer than visible light, which is therefore invisible to human eyes. As the universe expands, objects billions of light-years away are moving away from Earth so fast that their light is “redshifted” to the longer infrared wavelengths that the Webb telescope can see.

The universe as we think we know it came into being with the Big Bang about 13.8 billion years ago. Almost all objects in this image are distant galaxies; the few stars among them are distinguishable by their six-pointed diffraction peaks. Some of the background blobs are thought to date back to just 300 million years after the beginning of the cosmos.

Studying these primitive galaxies, according to astronomers, should help clarify what kind of stars condensed after the Big Bang and how supermassive black holes came to occupy the centers of almost all galaxies today. The preliminary results of these investigations surprised scientists by suggesting that there may be more primitive galaxies and massive black holes than traditional models of cosmic origins predicted.

This image of the Leda galaxy was taken on May 22, 2022, while astronomers attached to the European Space Agency were testing the telescope’s Near InfraRed Camera or NIRCam; ESA partnered with NASA and the Canadian Space Agency to build and operate the telescope. On 31 January, the ESA released the image to the public as Image of the Month.

Looking at this snapshot of eternity, it’s hard not to wonder whether microbes or something else are having similar success on Leda 2046648 or one of the other luminous blobs in the image, and whether we’ll ever know.

^{Translated by Luiz Roberto M. Gonçalves}