Let there be light: the Webb
According to the Big Bang theory, in the beginning of the universe there was darkness. The Webb telescope is shedding some light on how light came to be:
According to data from the Hubble and James Webb Space Telescopes, the origins of the free-flying photons in the early cosmic dawn were small dwarf galaxies that flared to life, clearing the fog of murky hydrogen that filled intergalactic space.
“This discovery unveils the crucial role played by ultra-faint galaxies in the early Universe’s evolution,” says astrophysicist Iryna Chemerynska of the Institut d’Astrophysique de Paris.
“They produce ionizing photons that transform neutral hydrogen into ionized plasma during cosmic reionization. It highlights the importance of understanding low-mass galaxies in shaping the Universe’s history.”
More at the link.
The EIGER Project, led by Simon Lilly (ETH Zurich, Switzerland), just published a series of three papers in The Astrophysical Journal, in which they used the Near-Infrared Camera on the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) alongside ground-based observations from the Very Large Telescope, Magellan, and Keck Telescopes to observe one of the brightest, most distant quasars known, SDSS J0100+2802.
This quasar’s gas-guzzling supermassive black hole generates a brilliant beacon of light that illuminates the gas all along the line of sight between us and it. Astronomers can thus use the quasar to probe the state of gas around intervening galaxies — especially faraway galaxies that might be associated with reionization.
“We had the perfect complementarity of the world’s best ground-based telescopes, giving us the quasar spectrum,” Lilly says, “and the beautiful Webb, which was able to get spectroscopic data on a large number of galaxies at this very interesting epoch.”
I don’t pretend to actually understand this and how it was done. But I get a glimmer …
“……the origins of the free-flying photons in the early cosmic dawn were small dwarf galaxies that flared to life, clearing the fog of murky hydrogen that filled intergalactic space……”
OK, where did the small dwarf galaxies come from? What caused them to come into existence?
And where did the hydrogen come from?
What created the hydrogen?
And what created the things that created hydrogen?
And what ……………
And check this out:
“A dwarf galaxy is a small galaxy composed of about 1000 up to several billion stars, as compared to the Milky Way’s 200–400 billion stars.”
Recall that our solar system lies within the Milky Way Galaxy and our sun is a medium sized star.
And some claim that the only place in the entire universe that contains intelligent life (excepting Washington, DC) is here on earth.
Yea right.
And oh yeah; there are BILLIONS of galaxies.
It’s the little galaxy that could!
Hydrogen was created in primordial nucleosynthesis just after the Big Bang. At first it was negatively “ionized”, meaning that the majority of it was just a proton with no electron (if you remember from Physics class, Hydrogen has 1 proton) and mostly no neutron either. The there was a period called “Recombination” in which the ionized hydrogen bound with electrons (making it neutral in charge) as the Universe cooled. Then there was a period called reionization, when most hydrogen lost it’s electrons again and the Universe gradually become transparent so light could travel great distances.
Immaculate conception. Unfortunately, not even the signals observed from outside of a limited frame of scientific integrity, support the “big bang” theory. Still, it’s plausible, even probable, like other theories of origin, and inferred articles of faith. People need to believe in something.
I reckon those “free-flying photons” are the remnant echoes of “Let there be light.”
But YMMV 🙂
Enuma Elish – ‘Light emanates from the gods and the firmament is created above the Earth.‘
John Tyler hits upon the real results of Webb…that is its continuing discovery of already formed galaxies that are, according to the standard BB timeline, should not exist. I would ask Lilly about such a distant quasar (meaning very early in the universe age), how such a supermassive black hole formed so early?
The Webb, in my view, is one of best scientific investments ever as it’s throwing so much of established theory into question. That’s the best science…and the only way we make progress in understanding.
But… but… but…I thought the science was settled!!!!!! Like global warming and the fatality rate from Covid 19! I’m literally shaking now. Literally.
John Guilfoyle, great idea!
Stellantis ought to build a new car at their Lingotto, Italy manufacturing plant.
“The Fiat Lux. YMMV.”
Yes JohnTyler, 100’s of billions of galaxies, each with 100’s of billions of stars. Start squaring numbers like those and you get ridiculous results. There are more stars in the universe than there are grains of sand on all of the beaches in the world.
For what it’s worth, I’ve rarely heard an astronomer argue we’re alone in the universe. But many do think we could alone in the galaxy.
Somebody ought to make a cartoon with a guy looking thru a large telescope into space seeing another guy looking thru a large telescope, only to realize he is seeing himself in a round universe.
( Yes, I know the light couldn’t travel that fast. It’s a cartoon)
Mike Plaiss,
As you write, when one looks at the available resources the numbers are so huge they approach the limit of infinity. So many stars and planets running so many experiments with elements, molecules, amino acids…
Even if the Goldilocks zone is necessary, there still must be billions of viable planets like ours.
We still don’t know how to jumpstart life given the proper molecular soup, but even if we assume that is inevitable, given the proper ingredients and conditions, there are so many steps to get to us I’m not so sure intelligent life at our level is inevitable. Even on our own planet, where we know life happened, the planet was just fine having all kinds of non-intelligent life for billions of years.
Single celled life first appeared about 4 billion years ago and that was just fine for about 500 million years and it took about 2 billion years to get to sexual reproduction. Was that a one time, fluke mutation or did changing conditions result in an environment where many asexual organisms mutated simultaneously? Then it’s about 500 million more years until we get the first, multicellular life. And even when life evolved incredible diversity, Earth seemed content to house all manner of plant and animal life of all shapes and sizes for hundreds of millions of years without the existence of anything capable of fashioning a shoe, let alone a telescope or rocket ship.
Then, look at what we know about the development of knowledge amongst humans, once we came along. Most cultures were just fine with “stone age” tech. Tribes still exist to this day that live in that fashion. Is agriculture the innovation that leads to “civilization?” If so, would man have developed agriculture if this planet wasn’t tilted so severely (23.8 degrees) on its axis?
And the evolutionary leap required to get bipeds with freed up hands and brains our size seems very precarious. Is there a species where a higher percentage of mothers die in childbirth than humans? And we have to be born a good 12 – 24 months premature with non-hard skulls. Multiple human births (twins, triplets) are rare. 11 – 13 years before we can sexually reproduce. Very risky stuff. Humans in nature are incredibly vulnerable. Nature doesn’t seem to favor intelligence beyond a certain cunning, even at caveman levels.
And, even if all those variable line up to give you an intelligent species with appendages that can manipulate tools, look at the hundreds of thousands of years myriad human tribes existed and did nothing that gets one close to a telescope or rocket ship. The Chinese invented movable type and did nothing with it. The Romans understood steam power. For hundreds of thousands of years horses, oxen, wind and water power were sufficient for human thriving.
It seems that divining the nature of electricity would be essential for a species to engage outside their planet. A lot of very intelligent humans looked at electricity and never learned its nature. Maxwell, Clerk, Volta… a few geniuses made astounding leaps in understanding that allowed others to come behind and use their findings. What if Maxwell had died of cholera, or in an invasion by raiders to his village? Would we still be living with 1700s technology?
It seems elementary to look at the sheer number of potential planets to assume intelligent life at or level, or beyond, must occur myriad times in our Universe. But I think it is easy for us to gloss over the myriad improbable events that must occur to get a species to our level. As I wrote, even when life thrived on this planet, Earth seemed just fine not having any species with our capabilities. Then, once we came along we seemed fine existing without taming electricity, steam or oil, let alone uranium and plutonium.
This Quasar’s gas-guzzling supermassive black hole generates a brilliant beacon of light that illuminates the gas all along the line of sight between us and it.
Pretty nifty trick for a 1970s television. But then, you’d be surprised what becomes possible when Motorola puts “the works in a drawer.”
theres an interesting astronomical observation Percival Lowell the one who ‘discovered’ the martian canals that would inspire HG Well’s War of the Worlds, actually did so because the way he shaped the lens of his telescope, he took a picture of the capillaries of his own idea,
The Webb telescope seems to be calling a lot of accepted cosmology into question. Big bang theory is only a theory and the presence of fully formed galaxies way back throws the whole idea into question. I’ve always thought a steady state universe made more sense and things light the red shift and expansion are artifacts rather than reality requiring dark matter and other fixes to make sense of observational data. Too many moving parts!
I want to care
Anton Petrov has a youtube channel in which he often talks about the JWT discoveries. It is worth checking out – he is very good.
I doubt there are any readers on this blog that have not heard this story, but I will tell it just in case. And I will count on other commenters to correct any errors I have injected into this:
It is reported that Bertrand Russell gave a lecture many years ago about cosmology and astronomy. Opened for comment after he was finished, a woman stood up and scolded him thus: “young man, everyone knows that the earth rests on the back of a turtle.”
Russell responds: “and what is the turtle standing on, ma’am?”
“Young man, it’s turtles all the way down.”
If it is fictional, it is a wonderful fiction.
I’ve heard the same story F, but always forget who the speaker was. Bertrand Russell sounds right. I don’t really care to investigate the truth of it. The story is just fine as is.