Newswise — Scientists from the University of Portsmouth have discovered that water was already present in the Universe 100-200 million years after the Big Bang.
The discovery means habitable planets could have started forming much earlier - before the first galaxies formed and billions of years earlier than was previously thought.
The study was led by astrophysicist Dr Daniel Whalen from the University of Portsmouth’s Institute of Cosmology and Gravitation. It is published today (3 March 2025) in Nature Astronomy.
It is the first time water has been modelled in the primordial universe.
According to the researchers’ simulations, water molecules began forming shortly after the first supernova explosions, known as Population III (Pop III) supernovae. These cosmic events, which occurred in the first generation of stars, were essential for creating the heavy elements - such as oxygen - required for water to exist.
Dr Whalen said: “Before the first stars exploded, there was no water in the Universe because there was no oxygen. Only very simple nuclei survived the Big Bang - hydrogen, helium, lithium and trace amounts of barium and boron.
“Oxygen, forged in the hearts of these supernovae, combined with hydrogen to form water, paving the way for the creation of the essential elements needed for life."
The researchers examined two types of supernovae: core-collapse supernovae, which produce a modest amount of heavy elements, and the much more energetic Pop III supernovae, which eject tens of solar masses of metals into space. Both types of supernovae, the study found, formed dense clumps of gas enriched with water.
While the overall amount of water produced in these early supernovae was modest, it was highly concentrated in dense regions of gas, known as cloud cores, which are thought to be the birthplaces of stars and planets. These early water-rich regions likely seeded the formation of planets at cosmic dawn, long before the first galaxies took shape.
Dr Whalen said: “The key finding is that primordial supernovae formed water in the Universe that predated the first galaxies. So water was already a key constituent of the first galaxies.
“This implies the conditions necessary for the formation of life were in place way earlier than we ever imagined - it’s a significant step forward in our understanding of the early Universe.
“Although the total water masses were modest, they were highly concentrated in the only structures capable of forming stars and planets. And that suggests that planetary discs rich in water could form at cosmic dawn, before even the first galaxies.”
The research is a collaboration between the University of Portsmouth in England and the United Arab Emirates University.
A new space telescope with game-changing capabilities is about to launch, and scientists are eager to see what it reveals. SPHEREx—short for Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization and Ices Explorer—is a small but powerful NASA mission designed to explore everything from interstellar dust to the origins of life beyond Earth.
Set to launch on March 4 aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California, SPHEREx will provide a full-sky infrared map like no other, helping scientists uncover mysteries about the early universe, galaxy formation, and the fundamental building blocks of life.
A Telescope That Sees Everything
Unlike other telescopes that focus on specific objects or small sections of the sky, SPHEREx will scan the entire sky four times over the next two years. According to Keighley Rockcliffe, a NASA scientist studying exoplanet atmospheres at Goddard Space Flight Center, this all-sky approach is what makes SPHEREx so exciting:
Using a prism-like spectrophotometer, the telescope will capture infrared light in more than 100 different colors, revealing cosmic structures and chemical signatures that are invisible to the human eye.
Hunting for the Ingredients of Life
One of SPHEREx’s most anticipated discoveries could come from its ability to map the distribution of water and organic molecules—the key ingredients for life. These molecules are hidden within vast molecular clouds, the birthplaces of stars and planets.
Although scientists have detected complex organic compounds in space before, they still don’t know exactly how these life-building molecules travel from interstellar clouds to forming planets. Manasvi Lingam, an astrobiologist at the Florida Institute of Technology, believes that SPHEREx could finally answer this question:
“This mission can improve the data and help make better forecasts about the probability of the origin of life on those worlds.”
By identifying where frozen water molecules and organic compounds are concentrated, the telescope could help scientists predict how common habitable planets are in the universe.
A New Look at the Early Universe
SPHEREx will also tackle one of cosmology’s biggest questions: What happened in the first fraction of a second after the Big Bang? Scientists believe that in the first billionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second, the universe underwent a sudden and massive expansion, a phenomenon known as cosmic inflation.
The problem? The physics behind this rapid expansion remain unknown. Olivier Doré, the SPHEREx project scientist, told Space.com.:
“We don’t understand the physics simply because it involved energy scales way beyond anything we can probe on Earth.”
By creating a 3D map of over 450 million galaxies, SPHEREx will trace the faint ripples left behind by cosmic inflation, potentially giving scientists the most detailed look yet at the universe’s earliest moments.
More Than Just a Cosmic Survey
Beyond its deep-space discoveries, SPHEREx could change the way astronomers view interstellar dust—a crucial but poorly understood component of space.
Keighley Rockcliffe noted that many astronomers see dust as an annoyance, as it blocks views of distant objects. But SPHEREx will prove that interstellar dust holds important secrets:
“SPHEREx will prove that there are interesting things hiding in between our stars that we should care about.”
Understanding the distribution and chemistry of interstellar dust could help refine astronomical models, improving everything from planet formation theories to galaxy evolution studies.
The Next Big Step in Space Exploration
With a budget of $488 million, SPHEREx is not the biggest or most expensive space telescope ever launched, but its unique capabilities make it one of the most promising. While telescopes like James Webb focus on ultra-detailed views of specific objects, SPHEREx will act as a cosmic cartographer, giving scientists a broad but incredibly detailed map of the entire universe.
And because it will scan the sky four times over, SPHEREx may even catch glimpses of previously unseen cosmic phenomena, opening the door to discoveries that scientists haven’t even imagined yet.
As March 4 approaches, the excitement among astronomers is growing—because when SPHEREx finally takes to the skies, the universe might never look the same again.
For more information on NASA’s SPHEREx mission, go to the mission’s website.
How did everything begin? It’s a question that humans have pondered for thousands of years. Over the last century or so, science has homed in on an answer: the Big Bang Seed.
This describes how the Universe was born in a cataclysmicexplosionteleologicalsprouting almost 14 billion years ago. In a tiny fraction of a second, the observable universe grew by the equivalent of a bacterium expanding to the size of the Milky Way. The early universe was extraordinarily hot and extremely dense. But how do we know this happened?
Let’s look first at the evidence. In 1929, the American astronomer Edwin Hubble discovered that distant galaxies are moving away from each other, leading to the realisation that the universe is expanding. If we were to wind the clock back to the birth of the cosmos, the expansion would reverse and the galaxies would fall on top of each other 14 billion years ago. This age agrees nicely with the ages of the oldest astronomical objects we observe.
The idea was initially met with scepticism – and it was actually a sceptic, the English astronomer Fred Hoyle, who coined the name. Hoyle sarcastically dismissed the hypothesis as a “Big Bang” during an interview with BBC radio on March 28 1949.
Then, in 1964, Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson detected a particular type of radiation that fills all of space. This became known as the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation. It is a kind of afterglow of the Big BangexplosionSeedsprout, released when the cosmos was a mere 380,000 years old.
The CMB provides a window into the hot, dense conditions at the beginning of the universe. Penzias and Wilson were awarded the 1978 Nobel Prize in Physics for their discovery.
More recently, experiments at particle accelerators like the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) have shed light on conditions even closer to the time of the Big BangSeed. Our understanding of physics at these high energies suggests that, in the very first moments after the Big Bang Seed, the four fundamental forces of physics that exist today were initially combined in a single force.
The present day four forces are gravity, electromagnetism, the strong nuclear force and the weak nuclear force. As the universe expanded and cooled down, a series of dramatic changes, called phase transitions (like the boiling or freezing of water), separated these forces.
Experiments at particle accelerators suggest that a few billionths of a second after the Big BangSeed, the latest of these phase transitions took place. This was the breakdown of electroweak unification, when electromagnetism and the weak nuclear force ceased to be combined. This is when all the matter in the Universe assumed its mass.
Moving on further in time, the universe is filled with a strange substance called quark-gluon plasma. As the name suggests, this “primordial soup” was made up of quarks and gluons. These are sub-atomic particles that are responsible for the strong nuclear force. Quark-gluon plasma was artificially generated in 2010 at the Brookhaven National Laboratory and in 2015 at the LHC.
Quarks and gluons have a strong attraction for one other and today are bound together as protons and neutrons, which in turn are the building blocks of atoms. However, in the hot and dense conditions of the early universe, they existed independently.
The quark-gluon plasma didn’t last long. Just a few millionths of a second after the Big BangSeed, as the universe expanded and cooled, quarks and gluons clumped together as protons and neutrons, the situation that persists today. This event is called quark confinement.
As the universe expanded and cooled still further, there were fewer high energy photons (particles of light) in the universe than there had previously been. This is a trigger for the process called Big Bang Seed nucleosynthesis (BBNBSN). This is when the first atomic nuclei – the dense lumps of matter made of protons and neutrons and found at the centres of atoms – formed through nuclear fusion reactions, like those that power the Sun.
Back when there were more high energy photons in the universe, any atomic nuclei that formed would have been quickly destroyed by them (a process called photodisintegration). BBN ceased just a few minutes after the Big BangSeed, but its consequences are observable today.
Observations by astronomers have provided us with evidence for the primordial abundances of elements produced in these fusion reactions. The results closely agree with the theory of BBN BSN. If we continued on, over nearly 14 billion years of time, we would reach the situation that exists today. But how close can we get to understanding what was happening near the moment of the Big BangSeed itself?
Scientists have no direct evidence for what came before the breakdown of electroweak unification (when electromagnetism and the weak nuclear force ceased to be combined). At such high energies and early times, we can only stare at the mystery of the Big BangSeed. So what does theory suggest?
When we go backwards in time through the history of the cosmos, the distances and volumes shrink, while the average energy density grows. At the Big BangSeed, distances and volumes drop to zero, all parts of the universe fall on top of each other and the energy density of the universe becomes infinite. Our mathematical equations, which describe the evolution of space and the expansion of the cosmos, become infested by zeros and infinities and stop making sense.
We call this a singularity. Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity describes how spacetime is shaped. Spacetime is a way of describing the three-dimensional geometry of the universe, blended with time. A curvature in spacetime gives rise to gravity.
But mathematics suggests there are places in the universe where the curvature of spacetime becomes unlimited. These locations are known as singularities. One such example can be found at the centre of a black hole. At these places, the theory of general relativity breaks down.
From 1965 to 1966, the British theoretical physicists Stephen Hawking and Roger Penrose presented a number of mathematical theorems demonstrating that the spacetime of an expanding universe must end at a singularity in the past: the Big BangSeed singularity.
Penrose received the Nobel Prize in 2020. Hawking passed away in 2018 and Nobel Prizes are not awarded posthumously. Space and time appear at the Big Bang Seed singularity, so questions of what happens “before” the Big Bang Seed are not well defined. As far as science can tell, there is no before; the Big Bang Seed is the onset of time.
However, nature is not accurately described by general relativity alone, even though the latter has been around for more than 100 years and has not been disproven. General relativity cannot describe atoms, nuclear fusion or radioactivity. These phenomena are instead addressed by quantum theory.
Theories from “classical” physics, such as relativity, are deterministic. This means that certain initial conditions have a definite outcome and are therefore absolutely predictive. Quantum theory, on the other hand, is probabilistic. This means that certain initial conditions in the universe can have multiple outcomes.
Quantum theory is somewhat predictive, but in a probabilistic way. Outcomes are assigned a probability of existing. If the mathematical distribution of probabilities is sharply peaked at a certain outcome, then the situation is well described by a “classical” theory such as general relativity. But not all systems are like this. In some systems, for example atoms, the probability distribution is spread out and a classical description does not apply.
What about gravity? In the vast majority of cases, gravity is well described by classical physics. Classical spacetime is smooth. However, when curvature becomes extreme, near a singularity, then the quantum nature of gravity cannot be ignored. Here, spacetime is no longer smooth, but gnarly, similar to a carpet which looks smooth from afar but up-close is full of fibres and threads.
Thus, near the Big Bang Seed singularity, the structure of spacetime ceases to be smooth. Mathematical theorems suggest that spacetime becomes overwhelmed by “gnarly” “design” features: hooks, loops and bubbles. This rapidly fluctuating situation is called spacetime foam.
In spacetime foam, causality does not apply, because there are closed loops in spacetime where the future of an event is also its past (so its outcome can also be its cause). The probabilistic nature of quantum theory suggests that, when the probability distribution is evenly spread out, all outcomes are equally possible and the comfortable notion of causality we associate with a classical understanding of physics is lost.
Therefore, if we go back in time, just before we encounter the Big BangSeed singularity, we find ourselves entering an epoch where the quantum effects of gravity are dominant and causality does not apply. This is called the Planck epoch.
Time ceases to be linear, going from the past to the future, and instead becomes wrapped, chaoticunfolding and randompunctuated. This means the question “why did the Big BangSeed occur?” has nodeep meaning, because outside causality, events do not need a cause to take placespawning a cosmos capable of inducing self-generating, self-replicating life / sentience / consciousness do not occur unguidedly.
In order to understand how physics works at a singularity like the Big BangSeed, we need a theory for how gravity behaves according to quantum theory. Unfortunately, we do not have one. There are a number of efforts on this front like loop quantum gravity and string theory, with its various incarnations.
However, these efforts are at best incomplete, because the problem is notoriously difficult. This means that spacetime foam has a totemic, powerful mystique, much like the ancient Chaos of Hesiod which the Greeks believed existed in the beginning.
So how did our expanding and largely classical universe ever escape from spacetime foam? This brings us to cosmic inflation. The latter is defined as a period of accelerated expansion in the early universe. It was first introduced by the Russian theoretical physicist Alexei Starobinsky in 1980 and in parallel, that same year, by the American physicist Alan Guth, who coined the name.
Inflation makes the universe large and uniform, according to observations. It also forces the universe to be spatially flat, which is an otherwise unstable situation, but which has also been confirmed by observations. Moreover, inflation provides a natural mechanism to generate the primordial irregularities in the density of the universe that are essential for structures such as galaxies and galaxy clusters to form.
TheoryvindicatedHypothesisequivocated
Precision observations of the cosmic microwave background in recent decades have spectacularly confirmed the predictions of inflation. We also know that the universe can indeed undergo accelerated expansion, because in the last few billion years it started doing it again.
What does this have to do with spacetime foam? Well, it turns out that, if the conditions for inflation arise (by chancedesign) in a patch of fluctuating spacetime, as can occur with spacetime foam, then this region inflates and starts conforming to classical physics.
According to an idea first proposed by the Russian-American physicist Andrei Linde, inflation is a natural – and perhaps inevitable – consequence of chaoticteleological initial conditions in the early universe.
The point is that our classical universe couldmust have emerged from chaoticteleological conditions, like those in spacetime foam, by experiencing an initial boost of inflation. This would have set off the expansion of the universe. In fact, the observations by astronomers of the CMB suggest that the initial boost is explosivesproutive, since the expansion is exponential during inflation.
In March 20 of 2014, Alan Guth explained it succinctlymechanistically:
“I usually describe inflation as a theory of the ‘bang’ of the Big Bang: It describes the propulsion mechanism that we call the Big Bang.”
So, there you have it. The 14 billion year story of our universe begins with a cataclysmicexplosionteleologicalexpansion everywhere in space, which we call the Big Bang Seed. That much is beyond reasonable doubt. This explosion sprouting is really a period of explosiveordered expansion, which we call cosmic inflation. What happens before inflation, though? Is it a spacetime singularity, is it spacetime foam? The answer is largely unknown.
In fact, it might even be unknowable, because there is a mathematical theorem which forbids us from accessing information about the onset of inflation, much like the one that prevents us from knowing about the interiors of black holes. So, from our point of view, cosmic inflation is the Big BangSeed, the explosionthatunmoved Mover / Creator started it all.
As they swing past one another (within the central white dot in the Webb images), the stellar winds from each star slam together, the material compresses, and carbon-rich dust forms. Webb’s latest observations show 17 dust shells shining in mid-infrared light that are expanding at regular intervals into the surrounding space.
Two mid-infrared images from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope of Wolf-Rayet 140 show carbon-rich dust moving in space. At right, the two triangles from the main images are matched up to show how much difference 14 months makes: The dust is racing away from the central stars at almost 1% the speed of light. These stars are 5,000 light-years away in our own Milky Way galaxy.
Image: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI; Science: Emma Lieb (University of Denver), Ryan Lau (NSF NOIRLab), Jennifer Hoffman (University of Denver)
“The telescope not only confirmed that these dust shells are real, its data also showed that the dust shells are moving outward at consistent velocities, revealing visible changes over incredibly short periods of time,” said Emma Lieb, the lead author of the new paper and a doctoral student at the University of Denver in Colorado.
Every shell is racing away from the stars at more than 1,600 miles per second (2,600 kilometers per second), almost 1% the speed of light. “We are used to thinking about events in space taking place slowly, over millions or billions of years,” added Jennifer Hoffman, a co-author and a professor at the University of Denver. “In this system, the observatory is showing that the dust shells are expanding from one year to the next.”
Like clockwork, the stars’ winds generate dust for several months every eight years, as the pair make their closest approach during a wide, elongated orbit. Webb also shows how dust formation varies — look for the darker region at top left in both images.
Video A: Fade Between 2022 and 2023 Observations of Wolf-Rayet 140
This video alternates between two mid-infrared light observations from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope of Wolf-Rayet 140. Over only 14 months, Webb showed the dust in the system has expanded. This two-star system has sent out more than 17 shells of dust over 130 years.
Video: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI.; Science: Emma Lieb (University of Denver), Ryan Lau (NSF NOIRLab), Jennifer Hoffman (University of Denver)
Video B: Stars’ Orbits in Wolf-Rayet 140 (Visualization)
When the two massive stars in Wolf-Rayet 140 swing past one another, their winds collide, material compresses, and carbon-rich dust forms. The stronger winds of the hotter star in the Wolf-Rayet system blow behind its slightly cooler (but still hot) companion. The stars create dust for several months in every eight-year orbit.
This animation shows the production of dust in the binary star system WR 140 as the orbit of the Wolf-Rayet star approaches the O-type star and their stellar winds collide. The stronger winds of the Wolf-Rayet star blow back behind the O star, and dust is created in its wake as the mixed stellar material cools. As the process repeats over and over, the dust will form a distinctive pinwheel shape. Credits: NASA, ESA, CSA, Joseph Olmsted (STScI). (There is no sound in this animation.)
The telescope’s mid-infrared images detected shells that have persisted for more than 130 years. (Older shells have dissipated enough that they are now too dim to detect.) The researchers speculate that the stars will ultimately generate tens of thousands of dust shells over hundreds of thousands of years.
“Mid-infrared observations are absolutely crucial for this analysis, since the dust in this system is fairly cool. Near-infrared and visible light would only show the shells that are closest to the star,” explained Ryan Lau, a co-author and astronomer at NSF NOIRLab in Tuscon, Arizona, who led the initial research about this system. “With these incredible new details, the telescope is also allowing us to study exactly when the stars are forming dust — almost to the day.”
The dust’s distribution isn’t uniform. Though this isn’t obvious at first glance, zooming in on the shells in Webb’s images reveals that some of the dust has “piled up,” forming amorphous, delicate clouds that are as large as our entire solar system. Many other individual dust particles float freely. Every speck is as small as one-hundredth the width of a human hair. Clumpy or not, all of the dust moves at the same speed and is carbon rich.
The Future of This System
What will happen to these stars over millions or billions of years, after they are finished “spraying” their surroundings with dust? The Wolf-Rayet star in this system is 10 times more massive than the Sun and nearing the end of its life. In its final “act,” this star will either explode as a supernova — possibly blasting away some or all of the dust shells — or collapse into a black hole, which would leave the dust shells intact.
Though no one can predict with any certainty what will happen, researchers are rooting for the black hole scenario. “A major question in astronomy is, where does all the dust in the universe come from?” Lau said. “If carbon-rich dust like this survives, it could help us begin to answer that question.”
“We know carbon is necessary for the formation of rocky planets and solar systems like ours,” Hoffman added. “It’s exciting to get a glimpse into how binary star systems not only create carbon-rich dust, but also propel it into our galactic neighborhood.”
These results have been published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters and were presented in a press conference at the 245th meeting of the American Astronomical Society in National Harbor, Maryland.
The James Webb Space Telescope is the world’s premier space science observatory. Webb will solve mysteries in our solar system, look beyond to distant worlds around other stars, and probe the mysterious structures and origins of our universe and our place in it. Webb is an international program led by NASA with its partners, ESA (European Space Agency) and the Canadian Space Agency.
Consciousness has the ability to transcend the physical world in moments of heightened awareness. His concept ties into the theory of hyperdimensionality, or the idea that our universe is not just made up of the three dimensions we perceive. Instead, the universe might actually be part of a much larger nexus with hidden dimensions.
If this controversial theory turns out to be true, we would have to accept not only that some beings may be residing outside the physical realm, free from the limitations of space and time, but also that our consciousness might have a similar capacity.
You’re living in a three-dimensional world. We all are. You can go left, right, forward, backward, up, and down. Now, picture a being that can pop in and out of your reality as if pressing a button, like the most brilliant master of illusions. Untethered from the physical limitations of our world, this entity can now travel instantly across vast distances in space. Whether you think of it as a type of “soul” or a “spiritual entity,” this being has unlocked hidden dimensions that some believe lie beyond our perception.
But what if you were similarly connected to these higher dimensions? What if another word for the otherworldly being in question were “consciousness”—including your very own?
...we all might have the potential to interface with higher dimensions when we engage our brain in certain ways, like while creating art, practicing science, pondering big philosophical questions, or traveling to all sorts of far-flung places in our dreams. In those moments, our consciousness breaches the veil of the physical world and syncs with higher dimensions, which in return flood it with currents of creativity, Pravica claims. “The sheer fact that we can conceive of higher dimensions than four within our mind, within our mathematics, is a gift ... it’s something that transcends biology.
Despite centuries of scientific study, the nature of consciousness remains a mystery. Theories to explain the phenomenon abound, ranging from neural networks in the brain to complex algorithms of cognition, but none have definitively captured its essence. Michael Pravica, Ph.D., a professor of physics at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, believes that we should be looking at hidden dimensions to explain consciousness. In his view, consciousness has the ability to transcend the physical world in moments of heightened awareness. His concept ties into the theory of hyperdimensionality, or the idea that our universe is not just made up of the three dimensions we perceive. Instead, the universe might actually be part of a much larger nexus with hidden dimensions, Pravica suggests.
This idea of consciousness interacting with higher dimensions ties into some of the most advanced theories in physics, like string theory. It says that everything in the universe—from the smallest particles to the forces that bind them—is made of tiny, vibrating strings.
If this controversial theory turns out to be true, we would have to accept not only that some beings may be residing outside the physical realm, free from the limitations of space and time, but also that our consciousness might have a similar capacity, Pravica claims.
An Orthodox Christian with a Ph.D. from Harvard, Pravica has found hyperdimensionality to be a unique way of bridging his scientific background with his religious beliefs. For this, he is on the fringes of traditional scientific thinking, taking more widely accepted ideas to extremes as a way to think about complex topics. Pravica believes hyperdimensionality is a much more familiar concept than we think. For example, he claims Jesus could be a hyperdimensional being—and not the only one. “According to the Bible, Jesus ascended into heaven 40 days after being on Earth. How do you ascend into heaven if you’re a four-dimensional creature?” Pravica asks. But, if you’re hyperdimensional, it’s very easy to travel from our familiar world into heaven, which could be a world of higher or infinite dimensions, he says.
Pravica suggests that we all might have the potential to interface with higher dimensions when we engage our brain in certain ways, like while creating art, practicing science, pondering big philosophical questions, or traveling to all sorts of far-flung places in our dreams. In those moments, our consciousness breaches the veil of the physical world and syncs with higher dimensions, which in return flood it with currents of creativity, Pravica claims. “The sheer fact that we can conceive of higher dimensions than four within our mind, within our mathematics, is a gift ... it’s something that transcends biology,” he says.
This idea of consciousness interacting with higher dimensions ties into some of the most advanced theories in physics, like string theory. It says that everything in the universe—from the smallest particles to the forces that bind them—is made of tiny, vibrating strings. The vibrations of these strings in multiple, unseen dimensions gives rise to all the different particles and forces we observe. “String theory is essentially a theory of hyperdimensionality,” says Pravica. “It’s looking at how the universe is put together on a sub-quantum scale.”
Hyperdimensionality may also help explain the curvature of spacetime, how space and time warp around massive objects like stars or planets and cause gravity. “If spacetime is not flat and it’s curved, then one could possibly argue that this curvature somehow comes from a higher dimension,” Pravica says.
A recent study by researchers in China proposes an intriguing hypothesis: entangled photons could be generated inside the myelin sheaths, the structures that surround nerve fibers. This discovery could provide a new explanation for the surprising speed of neural communication, a key element in understanding consciousness.
Neural communication, which is essential for brain function, relies on electrical signals traveling along axons. These axons are coated with myelin, a lipid substance that insulates and protects nerve fibers while accelerating signal propagation. However, the speed of these signals is still slower than that of sound and is too slow to explain the precise neuronal synchronization observed.
“When it becomes accepted that the mind is a quantum phenomenon, we will have entered a new era in our understanding of what we are.”
To explore this issue, the researchers applied quantum mechanics techniques inside the myelin sheath, treating it as an electromagnetic cavity. They discovered that entangled photons could be produced there, facilitating instantaneous communication along the axons. This entanglement, a phenomenon where two particles are closely linked, could allow for far faster information transmission than through electrical signals alone.
The results show that the production of these entangled photons could be significantly increased within the cavities formed by myelin. This entanglement could even influence the ion channels of neurons, which are essential for opening and closing signaling pathways, potentially across considerable distances within the brain.
Although this research is in its early stages, the discovery opens new perspectives on how neurons might synchronize their activities. It hints at a potential link between consciousness and quantum phenomena, a field still largely unexplored. Researchers hope that this direction will help them better understand the deep mechanisms of neuronal synchronization.
Summary: A new study suggests that consciousness may be rooted in quantum processes, as researchers found that a drug binding to microtubules delayed unconsciousness in rats under anesthesia. This discovery supports the idea that anesthesia acts on microtubules, potentially lending weight to the quantum theory of consciousness.
The research challenges classical models of brain activity, suggesting that consciousness could be a collective quantum vibration within neurons. These findings could reshape our understanding of consciousness, with implications for anesthesia, brain disorders, and consciousness in non-human animals.
Key Facts:
The study found that microtubule-binding drugs delayed unconsciousness under anesthesia in rats.
This supports the quantum model of consciousness, challenging classical theories.
The findings could influence our understanding of anesthesia, brain disorders, and consciousness in non-human animals.
For decades, one of the most fundamental and vexing questions in neuroscience has been: What is the physical basis of consciousness in the brain?
Most researchers favor classical models, based on classical physics, while a minority have argued that consciousness must be quantum in nature, and that its brain basis is a collective quantum vibration of “microtubule” proteins inside neurons.
New research by Wellesley College professor Mike Wiest and a group of Wellesley College undergraduate students has yielded important experimental results relevant to this debate, by examining how anesthesia affects the brain.
More broadly, a quantum understanding of consciousness “gives us a world picture in which we can be connected to the universe in a more natural and holistic way.”
Wiest and his research team found that when they gave rats a drug that binds to microtubules, it took the rats significantly longer to fall unconscious under an anesthetic gas.
The research team’s microtubule-binding drug interfered with the anesthetic action, thus supporting the idea that the anesthetic acts on microtubules to cause unconsciousness.
The findings are published in the journal eNeuro.
“Since we don’t know of another (i.e., classical) way that anesthetic binding to microtubules would generally reduce brain activity and cause unconsciousness,” Wiest says, “this finding supports the quantum model of consciousness.”
It’s hard to overstate the significance of the classical/quantum debate about consciousness, says Wiest, an associate professor of neuroscience at Wellesley.
“When it becomes accepted that the mind is a quantum phenomenon, we will have entered a new era in our understanding of what we are,” he says.
The new approach “would lead to improved understanding of how anesthesia works, and it would shape our thinking about a wide variety of related questions, such as whether coma patients or non-human animals are conscious, how mysterious drugs like lithium modulate conscious experience to stabilize mood, how diseases like Alzheimer’s or schizophrenia affect perception and memory, and so on.”
More broadly, a quantum understanding of consciousness “gives us a world picture in which we can be connected to the universe in a more natural and holistic way,” Wiest says.
Wiest plans to pursue future research in this field and hopes to explain and explore the quantum consciousness theory in a book for a general audience.
There was a Big Bang that created an exquisitely bio-tuned space-time matter-energy universe from a singularity or from nothing, or from "cosmic foam" spontaneity, which was instantaneously, immanently pregnant with reality – much as the moment of conception contains within it a specific LifeForm – and transcendently permeated by a Vital Force, with light acting as the ultimate carrier of information-knowledge, thus constituting a holonic Holy Hologram, thereby inducing consciousness and quantum mechanically enabling the cultivation of Divine Free Will.
A new paper by engineers from the University of Chicago's Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering (UChicago PME), the University of Houston's Chemical Engineering Department, and biologists from the UChicago Chemistry Department, have proposed a solution.
In the paper, published in Science Advances, UChicago PME postdoctoral researcher Aman Agrawal and his co-authors—including UChicago PME Dean Emeritus Matthew Tirrell and Nobel Prize-winning biologist Jack Szostak—show how rainwater could have helped create a meshy wall around protocells 3.8 billion years ago, a critical step in the transition from tiny beads of RNA to every bacterium, plant, animal, and human that ever lived.
"This is a distinctive and novel observation," Tirrell said.
The research looks at "coacervate droplets"—naturally occurring compartments of complex molecules like proteins, lipids, and RNA. The droplets, which behave like drops of cooking oil in water, have long been eyed as a candidate for the first protocells. But there was a problem. It wasn't that these droplets couldn't exchange molecules between each other, a key step in evolution, the problem was that they did it too well, and too fast.
Any droplet containing a new, potentially useful pre-life mutation of RNA would exchange this RNA with the other RNA droplets within minutes, meaning they would quickly all be the same. There would be no differentiation and no competition—meaning no evolution.
And that means no life.
"If molecules continually exchange between droplets or between cells, then all the cells after a short while will look alike, and there will be no evolution because you are ending up with identical clones," Agrawal said.
Engineering a solution
Life is by nature interdisciplinary, so Szostak, the director of UChicago's Chicago Center for the Origins of Life, said it was natural to collaborate with both UChicago PME, UChicago's interdisciplinary school of molecular engineering, and the chemical engineering department at the University of Houston.
"Engineers have been studying the physical chemistry of these types of complexes—and polymer chemistry more generally—for a long time. It makes sense that there's expertise in the engineering school," Szostak said. "When we're looking at something like the origin of life, it's so complicated and there are so many parts that we need people to get involved who have any kind of relevant experience."
In the early 2000s, Szostak started looking at RNA as the first biological material to develop. It solved a problem that had long stymied researchers looking at DNA or proteins as the earliest molecules of life.
"It's like a chicken-egg problem. What came first?" Agrawal said. "DNA is the molecule which encodes information, but it cannot do any function. Proteins are the molecules which perform functions, but they don't encode any heritable information."
Researchers like Szostak theorized that RNA came first, "taking care of everything" in Agrawal's words, with proteins and DNA slowly evolving from it.
"RNA is a molecule which, like DNA, can encode information, but it also folds like proteins so that it can perform functions such as catalysis as well," Agrawal said.
RNA was a likely candidate for the first biological material. Coacervate droplets were likely candidates for the first protocells. Coacervate droplets containing early forms of RNA seemed a natural next step.
That is until Szostak poured cold water on this theory, publishing a paper in 2014 showing that RNA in coacervate droplets exchanged too rapidly.
"You can make all kinds of droplets of different types of coacervates, but they don't maintain their separate identity. They tend to exchange their RNA content too rapidly. That's been a long-standing problem," Szostak said.
"What we showed in this new paper is that you can overcome at least part of that problem by transferring these coacervate droplets into distilled water—for example, rainwater or freshwater of any type—and they get a sort of tough skin around the droplets that restricts them from exchanging RNA content."
'A spontaneous combustion of ideas'
Agrawal started transferring coacervate droplets into distilled water during his Ph.D. research at the University of Houston, studying their behavior under an electric field. At this point, the research had nothing to do with the origin of life, just studying the fascinating material from an engineering perspective.
"Engineers, particularly Chemical and Materials, have good knowledge of how to manipulate material properties such as interfacial tension, role of charged polymers, salt, pH control, etc.," said University of Houston Prof. Alamgir Karim, Agrawal's former thesis advisor and a senior co-author of the new paper. "These are all key aspects of the world popularly known as 'complex fluids'—think shampoo and liquid soap."
Agrawal wanted to study other fundamental properties of coacervates during his Ph.D. It wasn't Karim's area of study, but Karim had worked decades earlier at the University of Minnesota under one of the world's top experts—Tirrell, who later became founding dean of the UChicago Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering.
During a lunch with Agrawal and Karim, Tirrell brought up how the research into the effects of distilled water on coacervate droplets might relate to the origin of life on Earth. Tirrell asked where distilled water would have existed 3.8 billion years ago.
"I spontaneously said 'rainwater!' His eyes lit up and he was very excited at the suggestion," Karim said. "So, you can say it was a spontaneous combustion of ideas or ideation!"
Tirrell brought Agrawal's distilled water research to Szostak, who had recently joined the University of Chicago to lead what was then called the Origins of Life Initiative. He posed the same question he had asked Karim.
"I said to him, 'Where do you think distilled water could come from in a prebiotic world?'" Tirrell recalled. "And Jack said exactly what I hoped he would say, which was rain."
Working with RNA samples from Szostak, Agrawal found that transferring coacervate droplets into distilled water increased the time scale of RNA exchange—from mere minutes to several days. This was long enough for mutation, competition, and evolution.
"If you have protocell populations that are unstable, they will exchange their genetic material with each other and become clones. There is no possibility of Darwinianteleological evolution," Agrawal said. "But if they stabilize against exchange so that they store their genetic information well enough, at least for several days, so that the mutations can happen in their genetic sequences, then a population can evolve."
Rain, checked
Initially, Agrawal experimented with deionized water, which is purified under lab conditions. "This prompted the reviewers of the journal who then asked what would happen if the prebiotic rainwater was very acidic," he said.
Commercial lab water is free from all contaminants, has no salt, and lives with a neutral pH perfectly balanced between base and acid. In short, it's about as far from real-world conditions as a material can get. They needed to work with a material more like actual rain.
What's more like rain than rain?
"We simply collected water from rain in Houston and tested the stability of our droplets in it, just to make sure what we are reporting is accurate," Agrawal said.
In tests with the actual rainwater and with lab water modified to mimic the acidity of rainwater, they found the same results. The meshy walls formed, creating the conditions that could have led to life.
The chemical composition of the rain falling over Houston in the 2020s is not the rain that would have fallen 750 million years after the Earth formed, and the same can be said for the model protocell system Agrawal tested.
The new paper proves that this approach of building a meshy wall around protocells is possible and can work together to compartmentalize the molecules of life, putting researchers closer than ever to finding the right set of chemical and environmental conditions that allow protocells to evolve.
"The molecules we used to build these protocells are just models until more suitable molecules can be found as substitutes," Agrawal said. "While the chemistry would be a little bit different, the physics will remain the same."
Kamala Harris says she has raised $230,000,000 in campaign funds from rich American liberals. Why are rich American liberals so determined to have Kamala as President of the United States?
One reason could be because she, unlike Trump, is easily controlled, so the explanation is the rich are electing their own self-interests.
But are they? The Democrats’ have two agendas: One is to normalize and legitimize sexual perversity. The other is open borders. To put it in different words, the Democrats are devoted to transforming traditional America into a Sodom & Gomorrah Tower of Babel.
Does this serve rich liberals’ interests beyond providing them with a servant class?
The main benefactors are sexual perverts and immigrant-invaders.
Do rich liberals prefer their genes not to be passed on because their transgendered kids are unable to procreate and are made infertile by Covid vaccines and a variety of testosterone-inhibitors that leave even young men unable to have a natural erection?
Their politics suggest that the interests of the rich liberals diverge from their heirs, the future of their country, and their self-respect. Everything with which the rich liberals are involved–Diversity, equity, and inclusion, global warming, globalism, the WEA’s Great Reset–undermines their commitment to their country. Rich liberals see America as a resource to be used in behalf of “larger agendas.”
So where does America’s leadership class come from?
It comes from the Jews. The Secretary of the Treasury is a Jew. The Secretary of State is a Jew. The Secretary of Homeland Security is a Jew. Finance, media, Hollywood and entertainment are in the hands of Jews. As Netanyahu told Congress yesterday, every Jew is a Zionist, a defender of Israel. And every American who is not a defender of Israel is an anti-semite. John V. Whitbeck describes the total humiliation of “Proud America” on its knees kissing Netanyahu’s feet. A totally conquered country whose obeisance is shown with 53 standing ovations.
In America today the remaining patriots are “Trump deplorables.” They are despised by the elite and the left-wing and regarded as white supremacists, threats to democracy, and insurrectionists. The FBI puts their names on watch lists and brings false charges against those who attended the January 6 Trump rally.
The Democrats having moved Biden out of the picture are set to steal the November election. Democrats in the swing states have legalized and institutionalized the theft mechanisms they used to steal the 2020 and 2022 national elections. For example, the Democrat state Supreme Court in Wisconsin overturned the ban on drop boxes, thus making it possible for invalid ballots to become part of the vote count. A large number of such practices that enable electoral fraud are now legal in the swing states.
Democrats could not steal the election with Biden as candidate as no one would believe he won. Biden was moved out of the way. Now polls are being rigged showing Kamala leading Trump by 3 points. The rigged polls create public believability of a Kamala win. If the Democrats did not intend to steal the election, they would not have legalized the theft mechanisms in the swing states.
The public accepted the last two stolen national elections and will accept a third. A people this insouciant have no chance of preserving their liberty and the accountability of government. Considering American insouciance, one wonders if the voting public and the Republican Party realize that if the Democrats take the election with so much going for Trump, the result will be to solidify the Uni-Party. The Republican establishment will conclude that the only way the party can compete with Democrats is to better represent the interests of the ruling elite. Henceforth there would be no more Trumps. “Representative Democracy” would only represent the ruling elite.
If Trump is elected despite the Democrats’ intent to steal the election, what can he do? Can he find people willing to accept the risks of helping him to reconstruct America? Can such people get confirmed in office by the Senate? Can Trump survive another four years of media, FBI, CIA attacks, and can his appointees? Can Trump survive assassination? Most certainly Trump cannot rely on Secret Service protection.
It is clear that America is split more decisively than it was by tariffs that led to the so-called “Civil War.” All relations in American society have been damaged by the liberal-left. Feminism has made women unsupportive and even hostile to men. Consequently, men cannot trust women. Families, the basis of society, are weakened. Men’s testosterone levels have dropped so much that you can’t even get into a fight in a redneck bar.
The Republicans point to Kamala’s war chest provided by rich American liberals and ask their working-class supporters to help fund Trump’s election. The mismatch of resources between Democrat billionaires and Republican working class “deplorables” is extraordinary. But note that for both parties the election is a matter of who has the most money.
This is the sign of a country that is finished, over and done with.
I have just witnessed the most pathetic and humiliating hour which I, as an American, have experienced in my lifetime.
After virtually every sentence uttered by the notorious war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu, no matter how inane or blatantly false, virtually all the attending political prostitutes infesting the U.S. Congress rose (53 times!) in a loud standing grovel of homage to their puppet master, most long and loudly when he condemned pro-justice and anti-genocide protestors on American campuses and on the streets of Washington during his speech as “useful idiots” financed by Iran.
Anyone watching this obscene spectacle could only conclude that the United States of America has ceased to be a respectable independent country and is now, as, indeed, it has been for many years already, a wholly-owned subsidiary of the State of Israel, with shared values which are rightfully rejected by the overwhelming majority of mankind.
By their venality, cowardice, moral bankruptcy and near-treason, the American political class is flushing a once great country down history’s toilet, and the Global West, if it does not soon liberate itself from domination by the Israeli-American Empire, risks a similar fate.
John V. Whitbeck is a Paris-based international lawyer.
It’s a little mind-boggling to think about, but there was a time when no stars existed in the universe. The earliest stars, galaxies and black holes came into being in a wondrous period called “cosmic dawn,” some 250 to 350 million years after the Big Bang [i.e., the Big Seed].
All sorts of ingredients of our universe were popping into existence at that time: stars, galaxies, black holes. Given all the components were there, could that short list include life itself? Could aliens have popped up much earlier in the universe’s 13.8-billion-year history?
The question of how life first came into existence has exercised scientists and philosophers for millenia. In a 2016 book on the subject, Sean Carroll describes how Jan Baptist van Helmont, a 17th Century chemist, thought that “the way to create mice from nonliving materials is to place a soiled shirt inside an open vessel, along with some grains of wheat.” After about twenty-one days, the wheat would supposedly have turned into mice.
“If for some reason you wanted to make scorpions rather than mice, he recommended scratching a hole in a brick, filling the hole with basil, covering with another brick, and leaving them out in sunlight.”
As Carroll goes on to say, “if only it were that easy.” One interesting angle on the question might be to go back not to the early years of Earth, but further — to those earliest millions of years after the Big Bang, when gravity essentially turned on the lights, pulling “us” out of the dark ages of a hot, dense and boring early universe into a cooler, more complex reality.
Avi Loeb, director of the Institute for Theory and Computation at the Center for Astrophysics co-operated by Harvard University and the Smithsonian, and a theoretical physicist focused on cosmology and astronomy, told Salon that with some creative thinking, it might be possible to find evidence that life started far, far earlier than the earliest evidence we have for it on Earth.
“I would say one hundred million years after the Big Bang, there were pockets of enriched material that could have led to planets and life as we know it, potentially,” Loeb said.
After all, that’s when the essential elements that make up life first appeared in our universe. Rooting around just in our solar system, we’re already finding evidence of the building blocks of life in unexpected places. In December, scientists studying findings from the Cassini mission (which sent a space probe to Saturn and its system in 1997, wrapping up in 2017) uncovered evidence of hydrogen cyanide on Saturn’s moon Enceladus. So if we’ve already found water, carbon dioxide, methane, ammonia and hydrogen gas on Saturn’s icy moon — which scientists predict are some of the crucial elements necessary for life to spring into being — would it be possible for them to create life much earlier in our universe’s evolution?
The life-giving elements emerged gradually after the Big Bang [i.e., the Big Seed], about 380,000 years after the explosion [i.e., the sprout], when the universe cooled enough for hydrogen atoms to form. For the next fifty to a hundred million years, space was completely dark, with hydrogen atoms spread across the universe, a gas that was eventually cleared – or ionized – by the ultraviolet light of the first generation of stars.
And then came the epoch of reionization, which lasted until about 100 billion years after the Big Bang, with new elements like carbon, oxygen, nitrogen and iron released from those first, massive stars,.They quickly exploded, giving way to a second generation formed around those heavy elements and others like cobalt and nickel, sulfur and silicon. Neutron stars merge to produce gold and uranium. The universe is full of stuff.
The region of habitability
But that’s not all you need to spark life. What about an atmosphere? Can’t forget the thing that lets us breathe and stay unbaked from solar radiation. For liquid water to exist — so as to have the chemistry necessary for life in a form we might recognize — you need external pressure. It can’t be done in a vacuum. Given the necessary pressure, you need a certain temperature. So the whole concept of a “habitable zone” for life is a Goldilocks one: in Loeb’s words, “Just the right distance [from a star], not too close so that it’s too hot, and not too far from the furnace so the surface freezes.”
The clever Youtube channel Kurzgesagt produced speculation about whether the life that exists on Earth might not in fact have originated way, way back and far, far away, some time during the cosmic dawn and in some other part of the universe, draws in part on Loeb’s theorizing about the early post-Bang universe. Basically, considering the requirements for a habitable zone conducive to life, Loeb realized that you can get around the requirement of being close enough to a star to be optimally warmed. You’ve just gotta go back in time. Because back then, the universe was not just smaller. It was hotter, too.
“In the early universe, that temperature requirement could have been met when the universe was just fifteen million years old,” Loeb said. “And that would allow liquid water to exist, or [an adequate temperature could be achieved] when it was about seventy-five million years old or so, when liquid methane or ethane would have existed just like in Titan.”
“It’s just the temperature of the entire universe because it’s filled with the radiation background, or the cosmic microwave background [...] so you don’t need the object to be close to a star to attain this temperature. It would have been everywhere.”
Life as we don’t know it
When you think about the building blocks of life, typically you need water. But there are potentially other solvents that could do the job: methane or ethane, for example.
After all, why assume that, if there’s life out there in the vast, unknown reaches of the universe, it follows the same contours as ours? Sure, the laws of physics place certain constraints on the pre-conditions for life – but there’s no reason to be so anthropomorphic, or terramorphic, about it.
Loeb cited the Dragonfly mission, currently scheduled by NASA to launch in 2028 to explore Saturn’s largest moon, Titan (as well as Enceladus, which is Saturn’s sixth-largest moon, another candidate for life in our solar system is Jupiter’s moon, Europa).
Loeb describes the Dragonfly mission as a fishing expedition. Literally: looking for alien fish.
“You go there and you look for fish, and if there is something moving and alive, that would be amazing,” Loeb said. “Because not only would we realize that life exists elsewhere, but also that it could take very different forms. Of course, I would not recommend putting these fish in restaurants on Earth and eating them, because it might not be good for our stomachs. But you can imagine — I mean, we just don’t understand how life emerged on Earth with its complexity and definitely not in other liquids.”
If we were to come across life based on solvents other than water, Loeb explained that “would open up a whole new frontier of biology to understand what happens in methane and ethane. And maybe it will lead to some important insights about life.”
It’s actually not just the temperature but a temperature gradient that seems to be needed to kickstart the initial reactions needed, but Loeb argues that under the surface of an object like a planet, you can get higher temperatures where liquids might hide, as we believe they do on Europa and Enceladus, for example, which are frozen on the surface due to their great distance from the sun, but which conceal liquid oceans buried under the ice.
“I mean,” said Loeb, “your life is as boring as you are, if you don’t have imagination.”
To be fair, though, Loeb has been accused of having a little too much imagination before, in particular when he was quick to suggest that ‘Oumuamua’, a mysterious, highly reflective space rock (or chunk of space ice) briefly pulled by the sun’s gravity into our inner solar system in 2017, might in fact be an artifact from an extraterrestrial civilization. But while Dr. Catherine Neish, associate professor in Planetary Surfaces at the University of Western Ontario, and a co-investigator on the Dragonfly mission, might not be looking for fish on Titan, her expedition will, she hopes, turn up at least the building blocks of life: amino acids. What she’s really interested in is prebiotic goo, the stuff from which life first arose – and which she can mimic with lab-created analogues (non-identical copies) of the kind of chemicals found in the haze in Titan’s organic chemical-rich atmosphere. During her PhD work she discovered that when you mix such chemicals with water, “you can make some really interesting products that are of a biological or prebiotic nature.”
“You take methane, nitrogen, you spark it with electricity, you make these haze analogues,” she told Salon in an interview, referring to Titan's thick, gassy atmosphere. “So no oxygen in there. It should be just carbon, nitrogen, hydrogen, those three elements. But then if you add them to water, they can react to form more interesting biological molecules. I was especially interested in amino acids and nucleotides which make up proteins and nucleic acids.”
While water is frozen most of the time on the surface of Titan, where it’s around -288.67º F on a balmy day, there are certain environments even there where you can heat up the rock enough that liquid water could exist – and thus the oxygen (part of the H2O molecule) that we need to have a hope of life. One of those environments would be the kind that exists after a comet strikes the moon’s surface, melting it, resulting in transient liquid water at the bottom of the impact crater it creates.
“You know, how far could you get towards life?” That’s the question Neish asked with the highly interdisciplinary research she conducted (working with chemists) for her PhD in Planetary Sciences, concluding that it wasn’t all that difficult to make prebiotic molecules like amino acids in such environments. Back when she graduated in 2008, actually going back to Titan to look for life there — whether Loeb’s hypothetical alien fish or a nice string of amino acids — seemed about as unrealistic as going back in time in search of the perfect cosmic microwave background to incubate life.
But then in 2016, Neish got word that Titan had been added to the NASA New Frontiers Program. And, a proposal and a long selection process later, Neish and her team are working on a plan to look for evidence of prebiotic chemistry in the wild, on an impact crater on Saturn’s moon.
“In the lab we have these experiments running for days, weeks, months at the most. Whereas Titan, these experiments have been happening for billions and billions of years. So you know, just how advanced can you get with prebiotic chemistry in a natural environment?” Neish asked.
It’s not just a hope of finding life on Titan that either scientist is thinking of, but the hope such a find on Titan might represent complex and interesting life one day being discovered elsewhere in the universe. And not just after the Big Bang, but in a galaxy far, far away.
“There’s so many mysteries about the environment in which life arose on Earth,” said Neish. “Because that Earth doesn’t exist anymore. So we can go to other planets like Titan and maybe it’s more representative of what the chemistry was on the early Earth, a billion years ago. And so by learning about what steps do we need to take to originate life, it tells us more about how life came to be here on Earth, but also elsewhere in the universe, on other planets.”
Some of the spiral galaxies studied by the researchers in the study. Credit: Vicki Kuhn
Relevant presentation begins at 33:35
University of Missouri scientists are peering into the past and uncovering new clues about the early universe. Since light takes a long time to travel through space, they are now able to see how galaxies looked billions of years ago.
In a new study, the Mizzou researchers have discovered that spiral galaxies were more common in the early universe than previously thought. The work appears in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.
"Scientists formerly believed most spiral galaxies developed around 6 to 7 billion years after the universe formed," said Yicheng Guo, an associate professor in Mizzou's Department of Physics and Astronomy and co-author on the study. "However, our study shows spiral galaxies were already prevalent as early as 2 billion years afterward. This means galaxy formation happened more rapidly than we previously thought."
This insight could help scientists develop a better understanding of how spiral galaxies such as the Milky Way, Earth's home galaxy, formed over time.
"Knowing when spiral galaxies formed in the universe has been a popular question in astronomy because it helps us understand the evolution and history of the cosmos," said Vicki Kuhn, a graduate student in Mizzou's Department of Physics and Astronomy who led the study.
"Many theoretical ideas exist about how spiral arms are formed, but the formation mechanisms can vary among different types of spiral galaxies. This new information helps us better match the physical properties of galaxies with theories—creating a more comprehensive cosmic timeline."
Using recent images from NASA's James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), the scientists found that nearly 30% of galaxies have a spiral structure about 2 billion years after the universe formed. The discovery provides a significant update to the universe's origin story as previously told using data from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope.
Studying distant galaxies with JWST gives Guo, Kuhn and other scientists an opportunity to solve a cosmic puzzle by determining the meaning of each clue.
"Using advanced instruments such as JWST allows us to study more distant galaxies with greater detail than ever before," Guo said. "A galaxy's spiral arms are a fundamental feature used by astronomers to categorize galaxies and understand how they form over time. Even though we still have many questions about the universe's past, analyzing this data helps us uncover additional clues and deepens our understanding of the physics that shaped the nature of our universe."
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