We may finally know what created the cosmic rhythms in the early Universe.
According to information from the Hubble and James Webb Space Telescopes, the origin of free-flying photons in the early universe were small clusters of young stars that burst into life, removing the fog of smooth hydrogen that filled the interstellar space. A paper on the research was published in February 2024.
Astronomer Iryna Chemerynska of the Institut d’Astrophysique de Paris said: “This discovery reveals the important role played by the faintest galaxies in the early evolution of the Universe.
“They produce ionizing photons that turn neutral hydrogen into ionized plasma during cosmic reionization. It highlights the importance of understanding low-mass galaxies in shaping the history of the Universe.”
Watch the video below for an overview:
At the beginning of the Universe, within minutes of the Big Bang, space was filled with a hot, dense fog of ionized plasma. The little light that was there would not have penetrated that vapor; The photon would have scattered free electrons floating around, making the Universe dark.
As the Universe cooled, after about 300,000 years, protons and electrons began to combine to form hydrogen gas (and a little helium).
Most wavelengths of light could penetrate this neutral zone, but there was very little in the way of light sources to reproduce it. But from this hydrogen and helium, the first stars were born.
Those first stars emitted radiation that was strong enough to strip electrons from their cores and regasify them. However, by this time, the Universe had expanded so much that the gas had spread out, and could not stop the light from shining.
About 1 billion years after the Big Bang, at the end of the period known as the cosmic interlude, the Universe was completely rebuilt. Ta-da! The lights were on.
But because there’s so much fog in the dawn of the universe, and because it’s so dim and distant across time and space, we’ve had trouble seeing what’s there.
Scientists thought that the sources responsible for most of the clean-up must have been powerful – large black holes whose expansion produces burning light, for example, and large galaxies in the process of star formation (baby stars emit a lot of UV light).
JWST was designed, in part, to observe the dawn of the universe and try to see what lies ahead. It’s so successful, it reveals all kinds of amazing things about this crucial moment in the formation of our Universe. Amazingly, telescope observations now suggest that young galaxies are the main drivers of the change.
An international team led by astronomer Hakim Atek from the Institut d’Astrophysique de Paris turned to JWST data on the galaxy Abell 2744, supported by data from Hubble.
Abell 2744 is so dense that the space-time around it forms a cosmic lens; any distant light that reaches us during that spacetime is amplified. This allowed the researchers to see small galaxies near the dawn of the universe.
Then, they used JWST to get detailed information about these small constellations. Their analysis revealed that, not only are these short sagarips a more powerful version of the original sagarips, they are also brighter than expected.
In fact, the team’s findings show that small galaxies outnumber large galaxies by 100 to 1, and that their total mass is four times greater than what is commonly thought to be the mass of large galaxies.
“These cosmic forces combined produce more than enough energy to do the job,” Atek said.
In spite of their size, these low-mass galaxies emit a lot of energy, and the number of them at this time is so great that their combined influence can change the entire state of the Universe.
It is the best evidence yet for the energy that caused reionization, but there is a lot of work to be done. The researchers looked at one small patch of sky; they need to make sure that their sample is not just a weird bunch of small necks, but a sample of the entire dawn population of the universe.
They intend to study many lensing regions of the sky to get a wider sample of the first stars. But in this one sample alone, the results are very interesting. Scientists have been chasing answers about reionization for as long as we’ve known about it. We are on the verge of finally clearing the fog.
Related: Extremely Rare Star Preserves Remnants of the Universe’s First Light
“Now we’ve entered uncharted territory with JWST,” said astronomer Themiya Nanayakkara of Swinburne University of Technology in Australia.
“This work opens up some interesting questions to answer in our efforts to map the evolutionary history of our origins.”
Research published in Nature.
An earlier version of this article was published in March 2024.
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