Astronomers believe the earliest galaxies continuously drew in gas from the vast intergalactic medium.
but astonishingly, this cosmic rulebook, appears to have undergone a dramatic rewrite during the universe’s infancy,” said study co-author Claudia Lagos, an astronomer at the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research and the Cosmic Dawn Center in Copenhagen in a University of Western AustraliaThe telescope was—of course—the Webb Space Telescope, a $10 billion space observatory launched to space in December 2021 and which has been making scientific observations since July 2022.
Until recently, the team noted, galaxies’ chemical abundances could only be reliably measured at redshifts of z=3.3 or less. But Webb allowed the recent team to measure such abundances at redshifts of z=7-10, or between 500 million years and 750 million years after the Big Bang.The researchers used Webb’s far-reaching gaze to measure the rates of star formation, stellar masses, and chemical abundances of galaxies from the universe’s first few hundred million years of existence.
“The most surprising discovery was that ancient galaxies produced far fewer heavy elements than we would have predicted based on what we know from galaxies that formed later,” Lagos said. “The early galaxies continually received new, pristine gas from their surroundings, with the gas influx diluting the heavy elements inside the galaxies, making them less concentrated.”The ancient galaxies aren’t even the most ancient Webb has seen.
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