Webb telescope just solved the ‘universe-breaking problem’

The James Webb Space Telescope might not have broken our understanding of the universe, after all.

Previously, astronomers used Webb to spot curious, faint, and extremely ancient red dots that they surmised were giant galaxies. But there was a problem. It shouldn’t have been possible for such massive galaxies — the earliest of which formed just some 500 to 700 million years after the universe was created — to have enough material to form copious amounts of stars and solar systems. (The universe is about 13.7 billion years old.)

New insights from the powerful space observatory, orbiting 1 million miles beyond Earth, suggest the faint light of these distant “little red dots” is actually generated by active black holes at the center of the galaxies. That means the red light we see isn’t coming from the glow of a prodigious number of stars.

“This is how you solve the universe-breaking problem,” Anthony Taylor, an astronomer at the University of Texas at Austin who co-authored the research, said in a statement.

“Contrary to Headlines, Cosmology Isn’t Broken,” NASA added, referencing earlier news coverage of the cosmic quandary.

The research was presented at the 245th meeting of the American Astronomical Society.

Astronomers looked at a wide population of the red objects observed so far, spanning a number of different Webb surveys and elapsing hundreds of millions of years. Around 70 percent of the red objects “showed evidence for gas rapidly orbiting 2 million miles per hour (1,000 kilometers per second),” NASA explained. That’s a telltale sign of a strong black hole: Black holes — which are objects wielding extreme gravitational power — amass accretion disks of super-heated, rapidly spinning dust, gas, and particles.

If the researchers are correct, the light you’re seeing from the red objects below is generated by the black holes at the center of these early galaxies.

Some of the “little red dots” viewed by the James Webb Space Telescope.
Credit: NASA / ESA / CSA / STScI / Dale Kocevski (Colby College)

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The case, however, isn’t fully settled.

Astronomers intend to keep investigating the curious red dots. For example, these objects begin appearing in great numbers around 600 million years after the Big Bang, but then plummet in number around 900 hundred million years later (1.5 billion years after the Big Bang). Why? Are they being obscured?

Webb scientists will continue weighing their novel observations with our understanding of how the universe works.

“There’s always two or more potential ways to explain the confounding properties of little red dots,” Dale Kocevski, an astronomer at Colby College in Waterville, Maine, who led the research, said. “It’s a continuous exchange between models and observations, finding a balance between what aligns well between the two and what conflicts.”

The Webb telescope’s powerful abilities

The Webb telescope — a scientific collaboration between NASA, ESA, and the Canadian Space Agency — is designed to peer into the deepest cosmos and reveal new insights about the early universe. It’s also examining intriguing planets in our galaxy, along with the planets and moons in our solar system.

Here’s how Webb is achieving unparalleled feats, and likely will for decades to come:

– Giant mirror: Webb’s mirror, which captures light, is over 21 feet across. That’s over two-and-a-half times larger than the Hubble Space Telescope’s mirror. Capturing more light allows Webb to see more distant, ancient objects. The telescope is peering at stars and galaxies that formed over 13 billion years ago, just a few hundred million years after the Big Bang. “We’re going to see the very first stars and galaxies that ever formed,” Jean Creighton, an astronomer and the director of the Manfred Olson Planetarium at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, told Mashable in 2021.

– Infrared view: Unlike Hubble, which largely views light that’s visible to us, Webb is primarily an infrared telescope, meaning it views light in the infrared spectrum. This allows us to see far more of the universe. Infrared has longer wavelengths than visible light, so the light waves more efficiently slip through cosmic clouds; the light doesn’t as often collide with and get scattered by these densely packed particles. Ultimately, Webb’s infrared eyesight can penetrate places Hubble can’t.

“It lifts the veil,” said Creighton.

– Peering into distant exoplanets: The Webb telescope carries specialized equipment called spectrographs that will revolutionize our understanding of these far-off worlds. The instruments can decipher what molecules (such as water, carbon dioxide, and methane) exist in the atmospheres of distant exoplanets — be they gas giants or smaller rocky worlds. Webb looks at exoplanets in the Milky Way galaxy. Who knows what we’ll find?

“We might learn things we never thought about,” Mercedes López-Morales, an exoplanet researcher and astrophysicist at the Center for Astrophysics-Harvard & Smithsonian, told Mashable in 2021.

Already, astronomers have successfully found intriguing chemical reactions on a planet 700 light-years away, and have started looking at one of the most anticipated places in the cosmos: the rocky, Earth-sized planets of the TRAPPIST solar system.