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Billowing soot clouds may not be what you expect astronomers to get excited about.
But now researchers using NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) have discovered that the rings of a distant galaxy are full of cosmic smoke.
Astronomers have discovered complex organic molecules prevalent in smoke and soot in a galaxy more than 12 billion light-years from Earth.
But rather than being a sign of intergalactic pollution, scientists think this discovery could help us understand how stars formed in the very first stages of the universe.
Because this galaxy is so far away, the light emanating from its rings has already traveled billions of years by the time it reaches the JWST.
Researchers using NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) have found that the rings of a distant galaxy are full of cosmic smoke
This allowed scientists to observe the galaxy SPT0418-47 as it was when the universe was only 1.5 billion years old — about 10 percent of its current age.
Normally it wouldn’t be possible to use a telescope to study something so extremely far away.
But luckily for the researchers, SPT0418-47 is almost perfectly aligned with another, closer galaxy.
Justin Spilker, an astronomer at Texas A&M University, and lead author of the study, explained that this creates a natural “cosmic magnifying glass” when light from the distant galaxy is bent and stretched by the gravity of the nearest body into a ring shape called a “Einstein ring.”
The light from this Einstein Ring can be up to 30 times brighter than it otherwise would have been, allowing scientists to see objects that are normally too distant and dim to see.
Dr. Spilker said this is what prompted him and his team to study this galaxy in the first place, because “it really shows us all the rich details of what a galaxy in the early universe is made up of, which we could never do otherwise.”
Kedar Phadke, who led the technical development of the project, said that thanks to the Webb telescope, scientists are now able to make discoveries that would never have been possible before.
“Discoveries like this are exactly what Webb was built to do: to understand the earliest stages of the universe in new and exciting ways,” Phadke said.
“It’s amazing that we can identify molecules billions of light years away that we’re familiar with here on Earth, even when they show up in ways we don’t like, like smog and smoke.”
The light from an Einstein Ring can be up to 30 times brighter than it otherwise would have been, allowing scientists to see objects that are normally too distant and dim to see
The scientists used the JWST and gravitational lenses to study infrared light emitted from the distant galaxy to find the presence of molecules called polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAH).
PAHs form near newly formed stars that give off masses of ultraviolet light and absorb that energy to become something like a cloud of smoke in space.
These long, tangled chains of hydrogen and carbon atoms play an important role in the birth of stars by absorbing energy and regulating how the gas in galaxies is heated or cooled.
Dr. Spilker said: ‘These large molecules are actually quite common in space. Astronomers used to think this was a good sign that new stars were forming. Everywhere you saw these molecules, baby stars were also flaring up.’
However, with this new discovery, the power of the JWST may have shown that smoke did not always mean fire in the early days of the universe.
“Thanks to Webb’s high-definition images, we found many areas with smoke but no star formation, and others with new star formation but no smoke,” added Spilker.
This means that the presence of cosmic smoke does not always mean that stars will form nearby, negating previous assumptions about how galaxies form.
The research team behind this discovery now hopes to use the JWST to learn even more about how stars formed at the beginning of the universe, with plans to search for PAHs in two more galaxies even further away.
“Now that we’ve shown for the first time that this is possible, we look forward to trying to understand if it’s really true that where there’s smoke there’s fire,” Spilker added.
‘We may even be able to find galaxies so young that complex molecules like this haven’t had time to form in the vacuum of space, so galaxies are all fire and not smoke. The only way to know for sure is to look at more galaxies, hopefully even further away than this.’
The study is published in Nature.