Astro Blog

By Dennis Overbye , The New York Times.  Excerpt: Since the James Webb Space Telescope began operating two years ago, astronomers have been using it to leapfrog one another millions of years into the past, back toward the moment they call cosmic dawn, when the first stars and galaxies were formed. Last month, an international team doing research as the JWST Advanced Deep Extragalactic Survey, or JADES, said it had identified the earliest, most distant galaxy yet found — [JADES-GS-z14-0] a banana-shaped blob of color measuring 1,600 light-years across. It was already shining with intense starlight when the universe was in its relative infancy, at only 290 million years old, the astronomers said. ...the wavelength of light from JADES-GS-z14-0 had been stretched more than 15-fold by the expansion of the universe (a redshift of 14 to use astronomical jargon), similar to the way a siren’s pitch becomes lower as it speeds away. That means light has been coming toward us for 13.5 billion ...

https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-66974738 By Jonathan Amos , The Guardian.  Excerpt: Jupiter-sized "planets" free-floating in space, unconnected to any star, have been spotted by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). What's intriguing about the discovery is that these objects appear to be moving in pairs. Astronomers are currently struggling to explain them. The telescope observed about 40 pairs in a fabulously detailed new survey of the famous Orion Nebula. They've been nicknamed Jupiter Mass Binary Objects, or "JuMBOs" for short. ..."Gas physics suggests you shouldn't be able to make objects with the mass of Jupiter on their own, and we know single planets can get kicked out from star systems. But how do you kick out pairs of these things together? Right now, we don't have an answer. It's one for the theoreticians," the European Space Agency's (Esa) senior science adviser told BBC News.... 

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adg4155 By SAMANTHA K. TRUMBO  AND  MICHAEL E. BROWN , Science.  Excerpt: [Editor's summary:] Europa, an icy moon of Jupiter, has a subsurface ocean beneath a crust of water ice. Solid carbon dioxide (CO 2 ) has previously been observed on its surface, but the source was unknown. Two teams analyzed infrared spectroscopy of Europa from the James Webb Space Telescope to investigate the CO 2  source. Trumbo and Brown found that the CO 2  is concentrated in a region with geology that indicates transport of material to the surface from within the moon, and they discuss the implications for the composition of Europa’s internal ocean. Villanueva  et al . also identified an internal origin of the CO 2  and measured its  12 C/ 13 C isotope ratio. They searched for plumes of volatile material breaching the surface but found a lower activity than earlier observations. Together, these studies demonstrate t...

https://www.fraknoi.com/astronomy/pahs-found-in-distant-galaxy/ By Andrew Fraknoi.  Excerpt: Astronomers working with the Webb Space Telescope have found a fortunate alignment in the sky that has enabled them to detect the faint signal of a complex building block of life just 1.5 billion years after the origin of the universe. The discovery of PAH’s (polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons) so soon after the Big Bang is another powerful demonstration that assembling the ingredients for the chemistry of life is a process that began in the vast clouds of raw material between the stars. And, it seems, it began quite quickly after the first generations of stars produced the required elements....