An international team of astronomers has so far used the James Webb Space Telescope to detect organic molecules in the farthest reaches of the universe using the James Webb Space Telescope. The types of molecules discovered are abundant on Earth in the form of smoke, soot and smog.
Scientists used the Webb Telescope to find organic molecules in a galaxy more than 12 billion light-years away, Texas A&M University reports. Since the galaxy is so far away, that means it took 12 billion years for the light to reach the telescope. This means that astronomers are observing the galaxy as it was at that time when the universe was less than 1.5 billion years old.
In addition to the impressive prowess of the Webb Telescope, scientists got a little help from a phenomenon called gravitational lensing. When you observe a distant space object, if there is a massive galaxy between it and you, the foreground galaxy will bend and distort the light behind it, effectively creating a lens that allows you to see the distant object better.
In this particular case, the light from the background galaxy is stretched and magnified into a round shape known as an Einstein ring. Albert Einstein originally predicted the phenomenon of gravitational lensing in his theory of relativity. In the data from Webb, the researchers found a signature indicating the presence of large organic molecules like those found in smog and smoke.
“These large molecules are quite common in space. Astronomers used to think they were a good sign that new stars were forming. Wherever you saw these molecules, the baby stars were also directly shining,” Justin Spilker, lead author of the paper, said in a press release. But new research shows that this idea may not always be true, according to Spilker. In the high-resolution images from Webb, scientists saw many regions with “smoke” but no star formation, and others with forming precursor stars but no smoke.
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