Just why did we spend all that money on a floating surfboard that sits and doesn’t move? Let’s find out what it’s done in it’s almost 2 year birthday out in space (Science operations began July 11 2022).
Before we begin, can we just look at this image? – because this was me when the April 8th Solar Eclipse happened..
On to the actual article now 😉
WE GOT NEW EYES!
Let’s start with the fun stuff – the things that will get the kids and the adults interested, for when they either don’t know, don’t understand or don’t care about what’s going on outside their personal bubble. The JWST vs. the Hubble Telescope (Image credit: ESA).
We’re seeing so much additional information in the same photos – look at the galaxies alone that are visible in the photo as points of light – these are not individual stars, but entire galaxies with hundreds of thousands of stars, just like our own.
OUR TEXTBOOKS WILL NEED TO BE REPLACED SOON!!
What better news to students and the education system alike, when you need to buy textbooks again. This time though, it’s not just rearranged chapters to get you to buy another book again. We’re finding galaxies so far away, 13.1 billion light years away, which is fine, however the problem is, they’re both extremely bright, and massive. Our understanding of physics and the universe are that these galaxies are some of the first galaxies born in the universe today, however they should also be very small due there not being enough gas in the universe at the time of their birth, to be the size they are.
More research needs to go into these, but so far, we’re seeing galaxies larger and brighter than our own Milky Way, at a time when it should not have been possible at all, not even remotely possible.
WE FOUND SOME OLD STUFF.. IT SHOULDN’T EXIST..
Black Holes – we all love them – they’re the universes vacuum cleaners, and will be around long after all the stars in the universe explode and die off – in what’s known as the Heat Death of the universe – maybe I’ll write something up on this later if everyone would like. This chart here shows where the timeline of the black hole CEERS 1019 was born, and the blue “fog” is when black holes began to form regularly and commonly across the universe.
So what does this mean? It means the universe was forming stars and other celestial bodies, using the lightest elements known, with a majority of Hydrogen and Helium. Stars of this composition burn fast and bright and when it exploded in a supernova, it left behind the black hole. As you can see with our current understanding of space, black holes should’ve started to form around the 700 million year mark of the universe, but CEERS 1019 was almost 250,000 years before. Why? We’ll hopefully find out soon!