The Big Bang was an autotelic cosmic seed, and the universe is an organism for cultivating Consciousness. All history is the history of the evolutionary transubstantiation of matter to Spirit via biological-life processes of Blood and Reason.
Back in 2010, Japan’s space agency JAXA completed one of the biggest milestones in the history of space exploration: It collected samples from an asteroid and brought them back to Earth. A decade later, the agency’s Hayabusa2 mission did the same thing with another asteroid called Ryugu—with a vastly more ambitious goal of bringing back an even bigger cache of extraterrestrial rock samples. For the past few years, scientists on Earth have been uncovering the chemical secrets embedded within these samples and whether there’s anything we can glean about the origins of the solar system and its planets. As it turns out, we’ve learned that Ryugu is home to a very special compound that’s a building block of genetic information itself.
On Tuesday, Japanese scientists revealed they discovered within the Ryugu samples the presence of uracil, a component that’s critical to the makeup of RNA. They also discovered nicotinic acid, better known as Vitamin B3 or niacin, which is important for allowing organisms to run metabolic functions.
Both materials have been previously discovered in carbon-rich meteorites that have impacted Earth. But, “this is the first time they have been detected in any returned samples from space,” Yasuhiro Oba from Hokkaido University, who led the new study, told The Daily Beast in an email. “Based on this finding, we can say uracil is indeed present in space.” The findings were reported in Nature Communications.
The new discovery arrives at a time when scientists are trying to piece together a better understanding of how the building blocks to life first originated on Earth. One of the most popular theories among researchers these days is that during the formation of Earth, asteroids were responsible for bringing in water, organic molecules, nucleic acids, and other compounds that form the constituents of proteins and genes and cells.
The problem? These theories have been based on the study of meteorite samples already on Earth. There’s always been a chance that they’ve been contaminated by terrestrial factors.
But missions like Hayabusa2 enable us to study pristine samples, delivered to us in sealed capsules, that haven’t been messed up by earthly treasures.
“It’s really encouraging that these compounds are so present in space.”
— Tanja Bosak, MIT
Tanja Bosak, a geologist at MIT who was not involved with the study, told The Daily Beast that the new findings are “not so shocking” given previous research. But, she said, “it’s a really nice confirmation of these materials and these compounds being widespread.” It adds fuel to the notion that carbon-rich asteroids are likely a major mechanism for delivering pre-biological chemical compounds to other worlds, as probably was the case for Earth.
“It’s really encouraging that these compounds are so present in space,” she said.
Oba acknowledged that he and his colleagues still cannot conclude how the uracil and niacin were formed and found their way onto Ryugu. But they think a possible formation mechanism has to do with photochemical reactions of interstellar ices that contain simple compounds like water, methanol, and ammonia. These reactions would have taken place long before the solar system first came together.
"Our research shows that nature could have selected for building blocks with useful properties before Darwinian evolution."
By simulating early Earth conditions in the lab, researchers have found that without specific amino acids, ancient proteins would not have known how to evolve into everything alive on the planet today—including plants, animals, and humans.
The findings, which detail how amino acids shaped the genetic code of ancient microorganisms, shed light on the mystery of how life began on Earth.
"You see the same amino acids in every organism, from humans to bacteria to archaea, and that's because all things on Earth are connected through this tree of life that has an origin, an organism that was the ancestor to all living things," said Stephen Fried, a Johns Hopkins chemist who co-led the research with scientists at Charles University in the Czech Republic. "We're describing the events that shaped why that ancestor got the amino acids that it did."
The findings are newly published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society.
In the lab, the researchers mimicked primordial protein synthesis of 4 billion years ago by using an alternative set of amino acids that were highly abundant before life arose on Earth.
They found ancient organic compounds integrated the amino acids best suited for protein folding into their biochemistry. In other words, life thrived on Earth not just because some amino acids were available and easy to make in ancient habitats but because some of them were especially good at helping proteins adopt specific shapes to perform crucial functions.
"Protein folding was basically allowing us to do evolution before there was even life on our planet," Fried said. "You could have evolution before you had biology, you could have natural selection for the chemicals that are useful for life even before there was DNA."
Even though the primordial Earth had hundreds of amino acids, all living things use the same 20 of these compounds. Fried calls those compounds "canonical." But science has struggled to pinpoint what's so special—if anything—about those 20 amino acids.
In its first billion years, Earth's atmosphere consisted of an assortment of gases like ammonia and carbon dioxide that reacted with high levels of ultraviolet radiation to concoct some of the simpler canonical amino acids. Others arrived via special delivery by meteorites, which introduced a mixed bag of ingredients that helped life on Earth complete a set of 10 "early" amino acids.
How the rest came to be is an open question that Fried's team is trying to answer with the new research, especially because those space rocks brought much more than the "modern" amino acids.
"We're trying to find out what was so special about our canonical amino acids," Fried said. "Were they selected for any particular reason?"
Scientists estimate Earth is 4.6 billion years old, and that DNA, proteins, and other molecules didn't begin to form simple organisms until 3.8 billion years ago. The new research offers new clues into the mystery of what happened during the time in between.
"To have evolution in the Darwinian sense, you need to have this whole sophisticated way of turning genetic molecules like DNA and RNA into proteins. But replicating DNA also requires proteins, so we have a chicken-and-egg problem," Fried said. "Our research shows that nature could have selected for building blocks with useful properties before Darwinian evolution."
Scientists have spotted amino acids in asteroids far from Earth, suggesting those compounds are ubiquitous in other corners of the universe. That's why Fried thinks the new research could also have implications for the possibility of finding life beyond Earth.
"The universe seems to love amino acids," Fried said. "Maybe if we found life on a different planet, it wouldn't be that different."
This research is supported by the Human Frontier Science Program grant HFSP-RGY0074/2019 and the NIH Director's New Innovator Award (DP2-GM140926).
The study's authors include Anneliese M. Faustino, of Johns Hopkins; Mikhail Makarov, Alma C. Sanchez Rocha, Ivan Cherepashuk, Robin Krystufek, and Klara Hlouchova, of Charles University; Volha Dzmitruk, Tatsiana Charnavets, and Michal Lebl, of the Czech Academy of Sciences; and Kosuke Fujishima, of Tokyo Institute of Technology.
"It would take billions of years to create a structure of this size."
The discovery of giant superclusters of galaxies are challenging our very understanding of the Universe.
In 2021, British PhD student Alexia Lopez was analysing the light coming from distant quasars when she made a startling discovery.
She detected a giant, almost symmetrical arc of galaxies 9.3 billion light years away in the constellation of Boötes the Herdsman. Spanning a massive 3.3 billion light years across, the structure is a whopping 1/15th the radius of the observable Universe. If we could see it from Earth, it would be the size of 35 full moons displayed across the sky.
Known as the Giant Arc, the structure throws into question some of the basic assumptions about the Universe. According to the standard model of cosmology – the theory on which our understanding of the Universe is based – matter should be more-or-less evenly distributed across space. When scientists view the Universe on very large scales there should be no noticeable irregularities; everything should look the same in every direction.
Yet the Giant Arc isn't the only example of its kind. These gargantuan structures are now forcing scientists to reassess their theory of how the Universe evolved.
What Lopez' "happy accident" uncovered was astonishing. When looking towards the constellation Boötes, a cluster of between 45 to 50 gas clouds, each associated with at least one galaxy, seemed to arrange themselves in an arc 3.3 billion light years across. That is a considerable size given the observable Universe is 94 billion light years wide.
According to Lopez's article, it is extremely unlikely (a probability of just 0.0003 per cent) that such a large structure could have arisen by chance. It suggests that it may have formed due to something in the natural physics of the Universe that we currently don't account for. Her findings directly challenge a central facet of the standard cosmological model – the best explanation we have for how the Universe started and evolved.
This facet, known as the cosmological principle, states that on a large scale, the Universe should look roughly the same everywhere, no matter your position or the direction in which you are looking. There should be no giant structures, rather space should be smooth and uniform. This is convenient, as it lets researchers draw conclusions about the whole Universe based only on what we see from our corner of it. However it also makes sense, as following the Big Bang the Universe expanded outwards, flinging matter in every direction simultaneously.
There is another problem. According to the standard model, structures like the Giant Arc simply wouldn't have had time to form.
It would take billions of years to create a structure of this size – Subir Sarkar
"The current idea for how structures formed in the Universe is through a process known as gravitational instability," says Subir Sarkar, a professor of theoretical physics at the University of Oxford.
About a million years after the Big Bang, when the Universe was expanding, tiny fluctuations in density led to bits of matter clumping together. Over billions of years, the pull of gravity eventually led these clumps to form stars and galaxies. However, there is a size limit to this process. Anything larger than about 1.2 billion light-years across simply wouldn't have had sufficient time to form.
"To form structures you need particles to congregate close to each other so gravitational collapse can occur," says Sarkar. "Those particles would have to move in from outside the structure to get there. So, if your structure is 500 million light years across, light would take 500 million years to move from one end to the other. However, the particles we are talking about are moving much more slowly than light, so it would take billions of years to create a structure of this size, and the universe has only been around for about 14 billion years."
The Giant Arc discovered by Lopez isn't the only large-scale structure discovered by astronomers.
There's the "Great Wall" (also called the CfA2 Great Wall) of galaxies discovered in 1989 by Margaret Geller and John Huchra. The wall is approximately 500 million light-years long, 300 million light years wide, and 15 million light years thick.
Even bigger is the Sloan Great Wall – a cosmic structure formed by a giant wall of galaxies, discovered in 2003 by J Richard Gott III and Mario Juric and their colleagues at Princeton University. That wall is nearly 1.5 billion light years in length.
In the last decade the discovery of these behemoths has accelerated even further. In 2014, scientists discovered the Laniakea supercluster, a collection of galaxies in which our own Milky Way resides. Lanaikea is 520 million light years across and contains roughly the mass of 100 million billion suns. Then in 2016 the BOSS Great Wall – a complex of galaxies over one billion light years across – was uncovered. BOSS is made up of 830 separate galaxies that gravity has pulled into four superclusters. The galaxies are connected by long filaments of hot gas. In 2020 the South Pole Wall, which stretches 1.4 billion light-years across was also added to the list.
However, the current record holder for the biggest of these structures is the Hercules-Corona Borealis Great Wall. Discovered in 2013, it spans 10 billion light years – more than one-10th the size of the visible Universe.
"We calculated it and then realised, 'Uh oh, this is the biggest thing in the Universe'," says Jon Hakkila, professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Alabama in Huntsville.
Their concern was justified. Both Hakkila and Lopez performed a range of statistical tests to try to prove that the results couldn't be down to chance. For the Giant Arc, the results have a confidence level of 99.9997%. In scientific research, the gold standard for statistical significance is known as 5- sigma, which equates to a probability of about 1 in 3.5 million that the results are down to chance. The Giant Arc reached a significance of 4.5 sigma, so there's still the possibility that the structure is a chance arrangement of stars.
"Our eyes are very good at seeing patterns. You might see initials in the clouds, but that's not a real structure, your mind is imposing a structure on what is actually random," explains Sarkar. "However, I don't think that is the case in this situation, I think it is a genuine physical chain of superclusters."
It isn't the first time that the model will have had to have been adapted.
If more structures like the Giant Arc and Hercules-Corona Borealis Great Wall are proven to exist, astronomers will be forced to rewrite – or at least revise – the standard model of cosmology.
"It takes a lot to make a paradigm shift, especially when people have their lives and careers invested in it, but ultimately with science we have to see who is right," says Sarkar.
Many galaxies in the early universe seem to be far more massive than expected. Researchers using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) spotted galaxies with masses up to 100 billion times that of the sun that must have formed faster than current models can explain.
Ivo Labbé at Swinburne University of Technology in Australia and his colleagues measured the distances to six massive galaxies using a phenomenon called redshift. Objects that are further from Earth are moving away from us more quickly, which causes them to appear more red than nearby objects. They found that these galaxies were all around 30 billion light years away, meaning that they formed within 700 million years of the big bang big seed.
“I would have guessed that galaxies like this would not exist this early in the universe,” says Pieter van Dokkum at Yale University in Connecticut, part of the research team. That is because the galaxies all had masses at least 10 billion times the mass of the sun, with one weighing in at 100 billion solar masses. From models of galactic evolution, we would expect galaxies as young as these to be relatively low-mass, without many stars at all, and then grow over time until they became more like our own Milky Way galaxy, which has a mass of about 1.5 trillion solar masses.
While these young galaxies are massive, they are also surprisingly compact. “What could be going on is that the centres of galaxies form very early, earlier than we thought, then the rest of the galaxy builds up around them,” says van Dokkum. “I suspect that we’re looking at not finished products, but beginnings that happened very quickly.”
JWST has broken the record for most distant galaxy ever confirmed.
The exact mechanism behind this “fast-track” galaxy formation – or galactic core formation, as it may be – remains to be seen. “If all of this holds up with further investigation, then we are looking at having to rethink about some of the early history of galaxy formation,” says Andrew Pontzen at University College London.
Further investigation is crucial though, Pontzen and the researchers say. That follow-up will consist of detailed observations and analysis of the galaxies’ light spectra with JWST, which van Dokkum says could take about a year.
If these findings do hold up, it may be a problem for our understanding of the universe more generally, not just galaxy formation. “It was pointed out to us after we submitted the paper that there wasn't actually enough gas in the universe at that point to form [as many massive galaxies as this study suggests] – and that was a bit of a shocker,” says Labbé. “If you form these monsters, and they contain more stars than the available gas in the universe, that's a bit of a problem.” That may mean we have to take a close look at our models of the early universe and its contents.
Astronomers released new images this week of the Milky Way that offer an unprecedented look at an enormous slice of the galaxy, complete with star clusters, clouds of cosmic dust and the supermassive black hole Sagittarius A*.
The images published on Wednesday, a product of the National Science Foundation's dark energy camera — which captured two years' worth of data via a telescope at the agency's observatory in Chile — are the second of their kind to come from the NSF's Dark Energy Survey. The project is essentially designed to observe and track the expansion of the universe. The survey revealed slightly more than 3.3 billion celestial objects across the Milky Way's galactic plane, marking the largest catalog so far produced by a single camera.
"This is quite a technical feat. Imagine a group photo of over three billion people and every single individual is recognizable!" said Debra Fischer, the division director of astronomical sciences at NSF, in a statement to the Harvard and Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. "Astronomers will be poring over this detailed portrait of more than three billion stars in the Milky Way for decades to come. This is a fantastic example of what partnerships across federal agencies can achieve."
NSF's dark energy camera, an instrument attached to the Víctor M. Blanco 4-meter Telescope at Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Vicuña, surveys the plane of the Milky Way at optical and near-infrared wavelengths from the vantage point of the southern sky. It produced more than 10 terabytes of data from 21,400 individual exposures during the latest outer-space survey, according to the federal agency.
The instrument's first collection of data was released in 2017. When taken together, data collected during the first and second rounds of the dark energy survey now account for 6.5% of the night sky, spanning 130 degrees in length, the NSF said. This is a gargantuan feat, since most objects in the Milky Way exist within the galaxy's disk — seen in images as the bright band stretching horizontally across the center — and some of its properties prevent astronomers from being able to see objects clearly. The "sheer number of stars" also poses challenges to observation efforts, according to the NSF, since they can overlap in images.
Merging data collected during a 2014 cosmic survey called PS1, which was operated by the Pan-STARRS 1 Science Consortium, with images compiled using the dark energy camera can provide an even broader view of the galaxy, explained Edward Schlafly, a researcher at the AURA-managed Space Telescope Science Institute, in a statement to the NSF.
"When combined with images from Pan-STARRS 1, DECaPS2 [the dark energy camera] completes a 360-degree panoramic view of the Milky Way's disk and additionally reaches much fainter stars," said Schlafly, who also co-authored a paper describing DECaPS2 published in the Astrophysical Journal Supplement. "With this new survey, we can map the three-dimensional structure of the Milky Way's stars and dust in unprecedented detail."
Scientists, astronomers and members of the general public can explore the Dark Energy Survey's full dataset, including three-dimensional portraits of the galaxy, using an interactive online interface found here.
NASA has reportedly shed light on a new plan to build a successor to the James Webb Space Telescope,
The Habitable Worlds Observatory was announced Monday at the latest American Astronomical Society meeting, and its goal is to search for signs of life on habitable exoplanets.
Space.com said on Friday that the observatory will need a powerful coronograph, which is an instrument that allows scientists to study faint objects.
Mark Clampin, the director of NASA's astrophysics division, reportedly said that the agency would approach the project as if it faced a strict launch window, building on previous technology used for the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope as well as Webb.
The Habitable World Observatory would be sent to a point – known as L2, or the second Lagrange Point – a million miles away from the Earth and opposite the sun.
"We're also going to plan this mission from day one to be serviceable," Clampin said, noting that in 10 to 15 years companies could do "straightforward robotic servicing" there.
"It gives us flexibility, because it means we don't necessarily have to hit all of the science goals the first time," he told attendees. Being able to service the observatory can extend the life of its mission.
The agency will reportedly turn to the commercial sector for the launch vehicle.
Notably, with this observatory, NASA is following through on the U.S. National Academies’ latest decadal survey, which called for NASA to revive the "Great Observatories" program.
According to Science, the report said that a six-meter telescope sensitive to ultraviolet, optical and near-infrared wavelengths could mark the start of that effort.
Scientists have unveiled the first-of-its-kind map of a magnetic field in space. Specifically, the team has charted the magnetic field of our Local Bubble in 3D. The new strategy for tracing magnetized structures in 3D will help address key questions about the influence of magnetic fields in the cosmos. Credit: T. O'Neill, A. Goodman, J. Soler, J. Han and C. Zucker.
Astronomers at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian (CfA) have unveiled a first-of-its-kind map that could help answer decades-old questions about the origins of stars and the influences of magnetic fields in the cosmos.
The map reveals the likely magnetic field structure of the Local Bubble—a giant, 1,000-light-year-wide hollow in space surrounding our Sun. Like a hunk of Swiss cheese, our galaxy is full of these so-called superbubbles. The explosive supernova deaths of massive stars blow up these bubbles, and in the process, concentrate gas and dust—the fuel for making new stars—on the bubbles' outer surfaces. These thick surfaces accordingly serve as rich sites for subsequent star and planet formation.
"Space is full of these superbubbles that trigger the formation of new stars and planets and influence the overall shapes of galaxies," continues O'Neill, who graduated from UVA in December 2022 with a degree in astronomy-physics and statistics. "By learning more about the exact mechanics that drive the Local Bubble, in which the Sun lives today, we can learn more about the evolution and dynamics of superbubbles in general."
"From a basic physics standpoint, we've long known that magnetic fields must play important roles in many astrophysical phenomena," says Goodman, who wrote her Ph.D. thesis on the importance of cosmic magnetic fields thirty years ago. "But studying these magnetic fields has been notoriously difficult. The difficulty perpetually drives me away from magnetic field work, but then new observational tools, computational methods and enthusiastic colleagues tempt me back in. Today's computer simulations and all-sky surveys may just finally be good enough to start really incorporating magnetic fields into our broader picture of how the universe works, from the motions of tiny dust grains on up to the dynamics of galaxy clusters."
The Local Bubble has emerged as a hot topic in astrophysics by virtue of being the superbubble in which the Sun and our Solar System now find themselves. In 2020, the Local Bubble's 3D geometry was initially worked out by researchers based in Greece and France. Then in 2021, Zucker, now of Space Telescope Science Institute, Goodman, João Alves of the University of Vienna, and their team showed that the Local Bubble's surface is the source of all nearby, young stars.
Those studies, along with the new 3D magnetic field map, have relied on data in part from Gaia, a space-based observatory launched by the European Space Agency (ESA). While measuring the positions and motions of stars, Gaia was used to infer the location of cosmic dust as well, charting its local concentrations and showing the approximate boundaries of the Local Bubble.
These data were combined by O'Neill and colleagues with data from Planck, another ESA-led space telescope. Planck, which carried out an all-sky survey from 2009 to 2013, was primarily designed to observe the Big Bang's relic light. In the process, the spacecraft compiled measurements of microwave wavelength light from all over the sky. The researchers used a portion of Planck observations that trace emission from dust within the Milky Way relevant to helping map the Local Bubble's magnetic field.
Specifically, the observations of interest consisted of polarized light, meaning light that vibrates in a preferred direction. This polarization is produced by magnetically aligned dust particles in space. The alignment of the dust in turn speaks to the orientation of the magnetic field acting upon the dust particles.
Mapping the magnetic field lines in this way enabled researchers working on the Planck data to compile a 2D map of the magnetic field projected on to the sky as seen from Earth. In order to morph or "de-project" this map into three spatial dimensions, the researchers made two key assumptions: First, that most of the interstellar dust producing the polarization observed lies in the Local Bubble's surface, and second, that theories predicting that the magnetic field would be "swept up" into the bubble's surface as it expands are correct.
O'Neill subsequently carried out the complicated geometrical analysis needed to create the 3D magnetic field map during the summer CfA internship.
Goodman likens the research team to pioneering mapmakers who created some of the first maps of Earth.
"We've made some big assumptions to create this first 3D map of a magnetic field; it's by no means a perfect picture," she says. "As technology and our physical understanding improve, we will be able to improve the accuracy of our map and hopefully confirm what we are seeing."
The 3D view of magnetic whorls that emerged represent the magnetic field structure of our neighborhood superbubble, if the field was indeed swept-up into the bubble's surface, and if most of the polarization is produced there.
The research team further compared the resulting map to features along the Local Bubble's surface. Examples included the Per-Tau Shell, a giant spherical region of star formation, and the Orion molecular cloud complex, another prominent stellar nursery. Future studies will examine the associations between magnetic fields and these and other surface features.
"With this map, we can really start to probe the influences of magnetic fields on star formation in superbubbles," says Goodman. "And for that matter, get a better grasp on how these fields influence numerous other cosmic phenomena."
Because magnetic fields only affect the movement and orientation of charged particles in astrophysical environments, Goodman says there has been a tendency to set aside the fields' influence when building simulations and theories where gravity—which acts on all matter—is the primary force at play. Further discouraging its inclusion, magnetism can be a fiendishly complex force to model.
This omission of magnetic fields' influence, while understandable, often leaves out a key factor controlling motions of gas in the universe. These motions include gas flowing onto stars as they form, and flowing away from stars in powerful jets emanating from them as they gather matter into a planet-forming disk. Even if the effect of magnetic fields is miniscule from moment-to-moment in the low-density environments where stars form, given the millions-of-year timescales it takes to gather gas and turn it into stars, magnetic effects can plausibly add up to something substantial over time.
Goodman, O'Neill, and their colleagues look forward to finding out.
"I've had a great experience doing this research at CfA and assembling something new and exciting with this 3D magnetic map," says O'Neill. "I hope this map is a starting point for expanding our understanding of the superbubbles throughout our galaxy."
By peering into a well-known star cluster within the Small Magellanic Cloud, Webb’s NIRCam instrument has revealed many new pockets of star formation that have never been seen. Further, new structures appear in this image that provide a window into the stars feeding within.
NGC 346, one of the most dynamic star-forming regions in nearby galaxies, is full of mystery. Now, it is less mysterious with new findings from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope.
NCG 346 is located in the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC), a dwarf galaxy close to our Milky Way. The SMC contains lower concentrations of elements heavier than hydrogen or helium, which astronomers call metals, compared to the Milky Way. Since dust grains in space are composed mostly of metals, scientists expected there would be low amounts of dust, and that it would be hard to detect. New data from Webb reveals the opposite.
Astronomers probed this region because the conditions and amount of metals within the SMC resemble those seen in galaxies billions of years ago, during an era in the universe known as “cosmic noon,” when star formation was at its peak. Some 2 to 3 billion years after the big bang, galaxies were forming stars at a furious rate. The fireworks of star formation happening then still shape the galaxies we see around us today.
“A galaxy during cosmic noon wouldn’t have one NGC 346 like the Small Magellanic Cloud does; it would have thousands” of star-forming regions like this one, said Margaret Meixner, an astronomer at the Universities Space Research Association and principal investigator of the research team. “But even if NGC 346 is now the one and only massive cluster furiously forming stars in its galaxy, it offers us a great opportunity to probe conditions that were in place at cosmic noon.”
By observing protostars still in the process of forming, researchers can learn if the star formation process in the SMC is different from what we observe in our own Milky Way. Previous infrared studies of NGC 346 have focused on protostars heavier than about 5 to 8 times the mass of our Sun. “With Webb, we can probe down to lighter-weight protostars, as small as one tenth of our Sun, to see if their formation process is affected by the lower metal content,” said Olivia Jones of the United Kingdom Astronomy Technology Centre, Royal Observatory Edinburgh, a co-investigator on the program.
As stars form, they gather gas and dust, which can look like ribbons in Webb imagery, from the surrounding molecular cloud. The material collects into an accretion disk that feeds the central protostar. Astronomers have detected gas around protostars within NGC 346, but Webb’s near-infrared observations mark the first time they have also detected dust in these disks.
“We’re seeing the building blocks, not only of stars, but also potentially of planets,” said Guido De Marchi of the European Space Agency, a co-investigator on the research team. “And since the Small Magellanic Cloud has a similar environment to galaxies during cosmic noon, it’s possible that rocky planets could have formed earlier in the universe than we might have thought.”
The team also has spectroscopic observations from Webb’s NIRSpec instrument that they are continuing to analyze. These data are expected to provide new insights into the material accreting onto individual protostars, as well as the environment immediately surrounding the protostar.
These results are being presented Jan. 11 in a press conference at the 241st meeting of the American Astronomical Society. The observations were obtained as part of program 1227.
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.
Galaxies shockingly similar to our own found near the beginning of the universe
The power of JWST to map galaxies at high resolution and at longer infrared wavelengths than Hubble allows it look through dust and unveil the underlying structure and mass of distant galaxies. This can be seen in these two images of the galaxy EGS23205, seen as it was about 11 billion years ago. In the HST image (left, taken in the near-infrared filter), the galaxy is little more than a disk-shaped smudge obscured by dust and impacted by the glare of young stars, but in the corresponding JWST mid-infrared image (taken this past summer), it’s a beautiful spiral galaxy with a clear stellar bar. Credit: NASA/CEERS/University of Texas at Austin
AUSTIN, Texas — New images from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) reveal for the first time galaxies with stellar bars — elongated features of stars stretching from the centers of galaxies into their outer disks — at a time when the universe was a mere 25% of its present age. The finding of so-called barred galaxies, similar to our Milky Way, this early in the universe will require scientists to refine their theories of galaxy evolution.
Prior to JWST, images from the Hubble Space Telescope had never detected bars at such young epochs. In a Hubble image, one galaxy, EGS-23205, is little more than a disk-shaped smudge, but in the corresponding JWST image taken this past summer, it’s a beautiful spiral galaxy with a clear stellar bar.
“I took one look at these data, and I said, ‘We are dropping everything else!’” said Shardha Jogee, professor of astronomy at The University of Texas at Austin. “The bars hardly visible in Hubble data just popped out in the JWST image, showing the tremendous power of JWST to see the underlying structure in galaxies,” she said, describing data from the Cosmic Evolution Early Release Science Survey (CEERS), led by UT Austin professor, Steven Finkelstein.
The team identified another barred galaxy, EGS-24268, also from about 11 billion years ago, which makes two barred galaxies existing farther back in time than any previously discovered.
In an article accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, they highlight these two galaxies and show examples of four other barred galaxies from more than 8 billion years ago.
“For this study, we are looking at a new regime where no one had used this kind of data or done this kind of quantitative analysis before,” said Yuchen “Kay” Guo, a graduate student who led the analysis, “so everything is new. It’s like going into a forest that nobody has ever gone into.”
Bars play an important role in galaxy evolution by funneling gas into the central regions, boosting star formation.
“Bars solve the supply chain problem in galaxies,” Jogee said. “Just like we need to bring raw material from the harbor to inland factories that make new products, a bar powerfully transports gas into the central region where the gas is rapidly converted into new stars at a rate typically 10 to 100 times faster than in the rest of the galaxy.”
Bars also help to grow supermassive black holes in the centers of galaxies by channeling the gas part of the way.
The discovery of bars during such early epochs shakes up galaxy evolution scenarios in several ways.
“This discovery of early bars means galaxy evolution models now have a new pathway via bars to accelerate the production of new stars at early epochs,” Jogee said.
And the very existence of these early bars challenges theoretical models as they need to get the galaxy physics right in order to predict the correct abundance of bars. The team will be testing different models in their next papers.
JWST can unveil structures in distant galaxies better than Hubble for two reasons: First, its larger mirror gives it more light-gathering ability, allowing it to see farther and with higher resolution. Second, it can see through dust better as it observes at longer infrared wavelengths than Hubble.
The more pressure on ZOG, the faster the rootless, transnational, satanic clique will collapse, and Europe will once again be a homeland composed of free White nations.
Nevertheless, Moscow is prepared to cooperate with more pragmatic European leaders in the future, the foreign minister said. “If some nationally-oriented politicians emerge [in Europe] who understand all the benefits of equal and mutually beneficial partnership with Russia, I can assure you, there will be no issues on our side,” he said.
“We are realists. We will continue to work with those few Europeans that cherish friendship with Russia. We will not cooperate with Russophobes,” Lavrov added.
When the first domino falls, ZOG's entire rotten edifice will collapse in on itself:
Relations between Moscow and Brussels are now at their “lowest point,” Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, told TASS in an interview published on Tuesday. The EU has declared a “hybrid war” on Moscow by unquestioningly following the US, the minister added.
The policies of Brussels have only hurt the interests and well-being of Europeans themselves, Lavrov said. He also accused Washington of barring EU nations from conducting dialogue on energy with Moscow, even though Russia’s supplies of fuel provided Europe with “unprecedented prosperity” for decades.
Following the launch of Moscow’s military operation in Ukraine, the EU began gradually reducing Russian energy imports through sanctions, which include a ban on EU imports of seaborne Russian oil, as well as a $60-per-barrel cap on Russian seaborne crude.
In late July, EU member states agreed on a plan to reduce their gas consumption by 15% over the coming months to reduce their dependence on Russian energy. These policies, coupled with the sanctions and the conflict in Ukraine, have led to an energy crunch in the EU, with gas prices climbing to record highs.
Russia will “no longer do ‘business as usual’” with partners such as these, Lavrov warned, adding that Moscow has no intention of “banging its head against a wall,” as it can find countries to work with beyond Europe.
World Jewry knows perfectly well that "demographics is density":
It must be nice to be able to explicitly organize and fight for your People without being harassed by ZOG, the FBI, the CIA, along with every other ungodly force imaginable. I guess being able to casually, openly, blatantly pursue their vested group interests is one reason why they consider themselves to be "Chosen".
Economic benefits and discounts will likely be offered to Jews to move into areas with significant Palestinian populations.
As part of deals struck to form Israel's new government last week, far-right parties and Likud have agreed to enforce a "Judaisation" plan in the Galilee and Naqab (Negev) regions, which have a significant population of indigenous Palestinian citizens.
The Religious Zionism alliance, led by Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir, has previously said it intended to strengthen Jewish settlement in the two regions located in northern and southern Israel, respectively.
This will likely be done through offering economic benefits and discounts to Jews to encourage them to move to those areas, according to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz.
The Religious Zionism party headed by Smotrich, who is set to become the finance minister, will have a seat on the council of the Israel Land Authority (ILA) which is in charge of allocating state lands for residential and other uses.
Palestinian citizens of Israel who live in the Naqab region have long accused the Israeli government of attempting to uproot them through various tactics.
Those include confiscation of lands from native Palestinians and turning landowners into tenants. Additionally, the Israeli government has been accused of preventing the expansion of Palestinian villages and encircling them new Jewish settlements.
Under the new government, the enforcement of the ILA policy will fall under Ben-Gvir's authority as national security minister.
His Jewish Power party will also receive the Negev and Galilee Development Ministry, according to the terms of his coalition deal with Likud, the party of Prime Minister-designate Benjamin Netanyahu.
Anti-Palestinian policies
Ben-Gvir, campaigning on anti-Palestinian far-right policies, has surged into the mainstream in Israel in recent years.
Among other controversial remarks is his frequent categorisation of Palestinian colleagues as "terrorists". He has also called for the deportation of his political opponents.
In his youth, his views were deemed too extreme by the army, which banned him from compulsory military service.
So far, he has reportedly secured several agreements with Likud that have raised alarm for Palestinians living in the occupied territories as well as those with Israeli citizenship.
There are nearly two million Palestinians with Israeli citizenship, making up nearly 20 percent of the population. Around 300,000 of them live in the Naqab.
Netanyahu had announced late on Wednesday that he formed a new government, minutes before a midnight deadline set by President Isaac Herzog.
Israel's longest-serving prime minister will return to power after his Likud party, far-right religious Zionist factions and ultra-Orthodox parties secured 64 of the parliament's 120 seats in what will be Israel's most right-wing administration in history.
Meanwhile, here in Occupied America, ZOG won't let us have borders:
Because, here in America, we aren't "Chosen". We're merely fungible, interchangeable, malleable cattle, with no identity, soul, spirit, history, or destiny - because those things are reserved for the "Chosen". If Whites want those things, they're haters, terrorists, bigots, racists, and fascists. But these rules don't apply to the "Chosen". Stop the hate.
The James Webb Space Telescope has captured a unique perspective of the universe, including never-before-seen galaxies that glitter like diamonds in the cosmos.
The new image, shared on Wednesday as part of a study published in the Astronomical Journal, was taken as part of the Prime Extragalactic Areas for Reionization and Lensing Science observing program, called PEARLS.
It’s one of the first medium-deep-wide-field images of the universe, with “medium-deep” meaning the faintest objects visible, and “wide-field” referring to the region of the cosmos captured in the image.
“The stunning image quality of Webb is truly out of this world,” said study coauthor Anton Koekemoer, research astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, who assembled the PEARLS images into mosaics, in a statement. “To catch a glimpse of very rare galaxies at the dawn of cosmic time, we need deep imaging over a large area, which this PEARLS field provides.”
The Webb telescope focused on a part of the sky called the North Ecliptic Pole and was able to use eight different colors of near-infrared light to see celestial objects that are 1 billion times fainter than what can be seen with the unaided eye.
Thousands of galaxies gleam from a range of distances, and some of the light in the image has traveled almost 13.5 billion years to reach us.
“I was blown away by the first PEARLS images,” said study coauthor Rolf Jansen, research scientist at Arizona State University and a PEARLS coinvestigator, in a statement.
“Little did I know, when I selected this field near the North Ecliptic Pole, that it would yield such a treasure trove of distant galaxies, and that we would get direct clues about the processes by which galaxies assemble and grow, he said. “I can see streams, tails, shells and halos of stars in their outskirts, the leftovers of their building blocks.”
Researchers combined Webb data with three colors of ultraviolet and visible light captured by the Hubble Space Telescope to create the image. Together, the wavelengths of light from both telescopes reveal unprecedented depth and detail of a wealth of galaxies in the universe. Many of these distant galaxies have always eluded Hubble, as well as ground-based telescopes.
The image represents just a portion of the full PEARLS field, which will be about four times larger. The mosaic is even better than scientists expected after running simulations in the months before Webb began making scientific observations in July.
“There are many objects that I never thought we would actually be able to see, including individual globular clusters around distant elliptical galaxies, knots of star formation within spiral galaxies, and thousands of faint galaxies in the background,” said study coauthor Jake Summers, a research assistant at Arizona State University, in a statement.
Other pinpricks of light in the image represent a range of stars in our Milky Way galaxy.
Measuring diffuse light in front of and behind the stars and galaxies in the image is like “encoding the history of the universe” because it tells a story of cosmic evolution, according to study coauthor Rosalia O’Brien, a graduate research assistant at Arizona State University, in a statement.
"The passage from the Chaos of the Big Bang to the Cosmos that we are beginning to know is the most awesome transformation of matter and energy that we have been privileged to glimpse."
-- Carl Sagan, Cosmos
"The passage from the teleology of the Big Seed to the Cosmos that we are beginning to know is the most awesome transubstantiation of matter and energy that we have been privileged to glimpse."
Maxwell Moe, astrophysicist, NASA Einstein Fellow, University of Arizona via David Kaiser and MIT:
“Reheating was an insane time, when everything went haywire,” says David Kaiser, the Germeshausen Professor of the History of Science and professor of physics at MIT. As the Big Bang theory goes, reports MIT, somewhere around 13.8 billion years ago the universe exploded into being, as an infinitely small, compact fireball of matter that cooled as it expanded, triggering reactions that cooked up the first stars and galaxies, and all the forms of matter that we see (and are) today.
CORRECTED TRANSLATION:
“When Reality Sprouted” — A Trillionth of a Second Before the Big Seed
“Reheating was a creative flourishing, when reality sprouted,” says I. As the Big Seed theory goes, reports this blog, somewhere around 13.8 billion years ago the universe emerged into being, as an infinitely small, compact point of matter that cooled as it expanded, triggering reactions that cooked up the first stars and galaxies, and all the forms of matter that we see (and are) today.
Marx had - literally and figuratively - one Hell of a run.
"The idea of time, space, matter and energy coming into existence from nothing, is completely incompatible with a materialist outlook on nature.
The whole experience of humanity demonstrates that not a drop of matter can be created or destroyed. Matter is its own cause: combining, dispersing and recombining for all eternity. To posit an act of Creation poses the question: what is its cause? If it was not a material factor (and, according to Big Bang cosmology, it could not have been a material factor as matter itself came into existence with the Big Bang) then it must have been an immaterial Creator: God.
"The date of Creation might have been pushed back from 6,000 years ago to 13.8 billion years ago, but this does not diminish its absurdity. No, as materialists we reject the idea of matter being created from nothing. The material universe is infinite and evolving. Certainly this poses new problems: by definition an infinite universe will always contain more to be discovered. As old problems are solved, new, higher ones are posed. But just as the Creation myth of Genesis only appeared to ‘solve’ the problem of where the Earth came from, a problem that was insoluble until Earth’s nebular origins were discovered in the 18th Century; so the Big Bang’s own act of Creation only appears to ‘solve’ problems such as the Doppler shift and the CMBR.
"We are not cosmologists. We by no means pretend to offer complete solutions to such problems. But we are confident that new discoveries and observations – like those of the JWST – will confirm the materialist outlook and overturn the idea of a moment of Creation...
"Academia is tending in the direction of philosophical idealism, led there by a ruling class that clings to the ‘hand of God’, and of an academic aristocracy that fiercely defends its interests, prestige, budgets and scholarships. The sciences are no exception. The logical conclusion of idealism is world creation: matter coming into existence from pure nothingness. In the form of Big Bang cosmology, such a view has made its way into the respectable corridors of academia.
"But this is just one tendency. In opposition to it, there are many scientists who wish to stand against the stream of idealism and mysticism in the sciences. Noteworthy is Eric Lerner, who has been ostracised by the scientific community for his brave stand against the Big Bang. We highly recommend his article The Big Bang didn't happen, commenting on the JWST’s results.
"Marxists understand that the battle against decaying capitalism consists not only in a political and economic, but also in an ideological struggle. As Lenin explained, in that fight, Marxists must learn to find allies among 'those modern natural scientists who incline towards materialism and are not afraid to defend and preach it as against the fashionable philosophical wanderings into idealism and scepticism which are prevalent in so-called educated society.'"
The Marxists' fatal problem is that there is nothing more absurd than their materialist outlook. It is their dogmatic assertion - that reality came about via unguided processes - which is absurd, irredeemably so. Here's the latest for the Marxists' edification. Enjoy!
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A new supercomputer simulation animates the evolution of the universe
DECEMBER 2, 2022, AT 10:00 AM / By James R. Riordon
It’s the most accurate, detailed glimpse of the early cosmos yet, researchers report:
"The infant universe transforms from a featureless landscape to an intricate web in a new supercomputer simulation of the cosmos’s formative years.
"An animation from the simulation shows our universe changing from a smooth, cold gas cloud to the lumpy scattering of galaxies and stars that we see today. It’s the most complete, detailed and accurate reproduction of the universe’s evolution yet produced, researchers report in the November Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
"This virtual glimpse into the cosmos’s past is the result of CoDaIII, the third iteration of the Cosmic Dawn Project, which traces the history of the universe, beginning with the “cosmic dark ages” about 10 million years after the Big Bang. At that point, hot gas produced at the very beginning of time, about 13.8 billion years ago, had cooled to a featureless cloud devoid of light, says astronomer Paul Shapiro of the University of Texas at Austin."
The Judeo-plutocracy has reinterpreted our literal universe and everything in it, to suit their ideological and racial agendas. They have done so via overt and covert warfare, and they spared no level of brutality and duplicity to attain their objectives. They are shameless and they have no respect for truth. Truth is absolutely irrelevant to them. All they care about is their agenda, and they bend everything to suit it. There will be some kind of Marxist-inspired cosmology coming down the pike, similar to how they manufactured Boasian anthropology - it's always the same agenda. In fact, Eric Lerner (whose 1992 book was resurrected in a pathetic attempt to save the day for Marxian materialism) is being set up to be the cosmological version of anthropologist Franz Boas. Nevertheless, the multiverse is probably the best ZOG can do.
No, The James Webb Space Telescope Did Not Disprove the Big Bang (Eric Lerner is Delusional)
Marxists hate the Big Bang. The reason Marxists hate it is because it negates their materialist philosophy. If the universe is nothing but matter in motion, the Marxists win. But if the universe is purposeful / guided / teleological, then it is not merely matter in motion, but instead was initiated by a creative force, and this entails teleology, which concomitantly obliterates materialism: Marx loses, Hegel wins.
The universe is not meaningless matter in eternal random motion, but rather is imbued with meaning and purpose, and even arguably alive. There is purpose and meaning to the cosmos, thus destroying Marxian materialism and all the social decay and moral / ethical rot it enables.
We are in a spiritual war, and these ideas are where it's being fought. The outcome of this war will determine the direction of world history. Notice how Lerner and his book are mentioned at the end of the Marxist.com article. This is ideological warfare, as openly admitted and clearly stated in said article. Notice even the title of the article: "a" universe, not "the" universe - thus leaving open their retreat into the multiverse. That retreat, however, has been cutoff. Materialism is dead. Teleology is back in town.
This Amazing Interactive Map of the Universe Takes You All the Way Back to the Big Seed
NEW YORK (AP) — U.S. Rep. Mary Miller of Illinois, speaking at a rally Saturday night with former President Donald Trump, called the Supreme Court’s decision overturning Roe v. Wade a “victory for White life.”
Miller’s spokesman said the Illinois Republican had intended to say the decision was a victory for a “right to life.” The line as delivered was out of step with the disproportionate impact the repeal of abortion rights will have on women of color. [ed., "White" is a color too].
Miller is running for reelection in the state’s newly redrawn 15th Congressional District against GOP Rep. Rodney Davis with the former president’s blessing. She had been invited on stage to speak by Trump, who held the rally in Mendon, Illinois, to turn out the vote ahead of the state’s Tuesday primary.
“President Trump, on behalf of all the MAGA patriots in America, I want to thank you for the historic victory for White life in the Supreme Court yesterday,” she said, drawing cheers from the crowd.
Miller spokesman Isaiah Wartman told The Associated Press that it was “a mix-up of words.”
“You can clearly see in the video … she’s looking at her papers and looking at her speech,” Wartman said.
Her campaign noted that she is the grandmother of several nonwhite grandchildren, including one with Down syndrome.
The freshman congresswoman, who was among those who voted to overturn the results of the 2020 election, previously came under criticism for quoting Adolf Hitler.
“Hitler was right on one thing. He said, ’Whoever has the youth has the future,’” Miller said in a speech last year, according to video posted by WCIA-TV. She later apologized after Democrats in Illinois called for her resignation.
The rally came as some elements of the far rightpro-White have pushed the “great replacement theory” [ed., the "great replacement" is not a "theory" - it is demographic fact], a racist ideology [ed., because it's "racist" if Whites want to survive] that alleges White people and their influence are being “replaced” by people of color. Proponents blame both immigration as well as demographic changes, including White birth rates.
During the rally, Trump took a victory lap for the Supreme Court’s bombshell ruling Friday ending the constitutional right to abortion. The three conservative justices he appointed all voted in favor.
He noted that in 2016, he promised to appoint judges who opposed abortion rights.
“Yesterday the court handed down a victory for the Constitution, a victory for the rule of law, and above all, a victory for life,” he told the crowd, which broke into a chant of “Thank you Trump!.”
Trump at the rally also endorsed Republican Darren Bailey, who is running to become the party’s nominee for governor.
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But was it a mistake? The attendees cheered, and they had no way of knowing whether it was a mistake. Despite the System Whore disclaimers about gaffes and non-White grandchildren and Down syndrome, perhaps the enemy coalition has finally gone too far and a brutal, decisive blowback is on its way. We will see.
In the sixth episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, Officer Jean Luc Picard and his android companion Data find themselves on the edge of the known universe. As Picard examines the barrier in front of the Enterprise, Data declares that they’ve landed “where none have gone before.”
While researchers have not quite made it to the edge of the universe, they did just creep one step further with the discovery of a galaxy up to 13.5 billion light-years away, named HD1. In a study published today in The Astrophysical Journal and an accompanying paper in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society Letters, University of Tokyo astronomer Yuichi Harikane and his colleagues outline the methods of discovery and possible implications of HD1’s existence. It’s the most distant cosmic body on record so far.
“It was very hard work to find HD1 out of more than 700,000 objects,” Harikane said in a press release. “HD1’s red color matched the expected characteristics of a galaxy 13.5 billion light-years away surprisingly well, giving me a little bit of goosebumps when I found it.”
Harikane and his team spent over 1,200 hours capturing images through the VISTA Telescope in Chile, the former Spitzer Space Telescope, and both the UK Infrared Telescope and the Subaru Telescope on the Big Island of Hawaii. They then used an array of radio wavelength receivers, also in Chile, to calculate redshift, a formula that helps astronomers estimate distances based on how light changes as the universe expands. The data showed an unexpectedly bright UV signature from HD1, which the study argues is due to one of two causes.
“The very first population of stars that formed in the universe were more massive, more luminous and hotter than modern stars,” Fabio Pacucci, an astronomer at the Center for Astrophysics in Massachusetts and coauthor of the study, said in the press release. “If we assume the stars produced in HD1 are these first, or Population III, stars, then its properties could be explained more easily. In fact, Population III stars are capable of producing more UV light than normal stars, which could clarify the extreme ultraviolet luminosity of HD1.”
HD1 might contain stars created relatively soon after the Big Seed, which would explain the high amount of light intensity researchers logged. If the luminosity is not due to Population III Stars, it could be coming from a black hole 100 million times as massive as the sun. Such a gigantic void would consume mass violently enough to generate bright light. These hypotheses, however, do not explain the rate at which the superpowered galaxy forms stars. HD1 appears to churn out roughly 100 stars per year, which is nearly 10 times the rate of similarly fashioned galaxies.
“Answering questions about the nature of a source so far away can be challenging,” Pacucci said in a press release. “It’s like guessing the nationality of a ship from the flag it flies, while being faraway ashore, with the vessel in the middle of a gale and dense fog. One can maybe see some colors and shapes of the flag, but not in their entirety. It’s ultimately a long game of analysis and exclusion of implausible scenarios.”
While questions continue to surround HD1, like a more exact distance, size, and composition, the team’s findings furthers humanity’s map of the known universe. And with further confirmation, they could deepen our understanding of the origins of the universe, too.
It all started around 13.8 billion years ago with a big, cosmological “bang”"sprout" that brought the universe suddenly and spectacularly into existence. Shortly after, the infant universe cooled dramatically and went completely dark.
cosmic teleological evolution
Evolution of simulated properties in the main Thesan run. Time progresses from left to right. The dark matter (top panel) collapse in the cosmic web structure composed of clumps (haloes) connected by filaments, and the gas (second panel from the top) follows, collapsing to create galaxies. These produce ionizing photons that drive cosmic reionization (third panel from the top), heating up the gas in the process (bottom panel). -- Courtesy of THESAN Simulations.
Then, within a couple hundred million years after the Big BangSeed, the universe woke up, as gravity gathered matter into the first stars and galaxies. Light from these first stars turned the surrounding gas into a hot, ionized plasma — a crucial transformation known as cosmic reionization that propelled the universe into the complex structure that we see today.
Now, scientists can get a detailed view of how the universe may have unfolded during this pivotal period with a new simulation, known as Thesan, developed by scientists at MIT, Harvard University, and the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics.
Named after the Etruscan goddess of the dawn, Thesan is designed to simulate the “cosmic dawn,” and specifically cosmic reionization, a period which has been challenging to reconstruct, as it involves immensely complicated, chaoticspontaneous interactions, including those between gravity, gas, and radiation.
The Thesan simulation resolves these interactions with the highest detail and over the largest volume of any previous simulation. It does so by combining a realistic model of galaxy formation with a new algorithm that tracks how light interacts with gas, along with a model for cosmic dust.
With Thesan, the researchers can simulate a cubic volume of the universe spanning 300 million light years across. They run the simulation forward in time to track the first appearance and evolution of hundreds of thousands of galaxies within this space, beginning around 400,000 years after the Big BangSeed, and through the first billion years.
So far, the simulations align with what few observations astronomers have of the early universe. As more observations are made of this period, for instance with the newly launched James Webb Space Telescope, Thesan may help to place such observations in cosmic context.
For now, the simulations are starting to shed light on certain processes, such as how far light can travel in the early universe, and which galaxies were responsible for reionization.
“Thesan acts as a bridge to the early universe,” says Aaron Smith, a NASA Einstein Fellow in MIT’s Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research. “It is intended to serve as an ideal simulation counterpart for upcoming observational facilities, which are poised to fundamentally alter our understanding of the cosmos.”
Smith and Mark Vogelsberger, associate professor of physics at MIT, Rahul Kannan of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, and Enrico Garaldi at Max Planck have introduced the Thesan simulation through three papers, the third published today in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
Follow the light
In the earliest stages of cosmic reionization, the universe was a dark and homogenous space. For physicists, the cosmic evolution during these early “dark ages” is relatively simple to calculate.
“In principle you could work this out with pen and paper,” Smith says. “But at some point gravity starts to pull and collapse matter together, at first slowly, but then so quickly that calculations become too complicated, and we have to do a full simulation.”
To fully simulate cosmic reionization, the team sought to include as many major ingredients of the early universe as possible. They started off with a successful model of galaxy formation that their groups previously developed, called Illustris-TNG, which has been shown to accurately simulate the properties and populations of evolving galaxies. They then developed a new code to incorporate how the light from galaxies and stars interact with and reionize the surrounding gas — an extremely complex process that other simulations have not been able to accurately reproduce at large scale.
“Thesan follows how the light from these first galaxies interacts with the gas over the first billion years and transforms the universe from neutral to ionized,” Kannan says. “This way, we automatically follow the reionization process as it unfolds.”
Finally, the team included a preliminary model of cosmic dust — another feature that is unique to such simulations of the early universe. This early model aims to describe how tiny grains of material influence the formation of galaxies in the early, sparse universe.
Cosmic bridge
With the simulation’s ingredients in place, the team set its initial conditions for around 400,000 years after the Big BangSeed, based on precision measurements of relic light from the Big BangSeed. They then evolved these conditions forward in time to simulate a patch of the universe, using the SuperMUC-NG machine — one of the largest supercomputers in the world — which simultaneously harnessed 60,000 computing cores to carry out Thesan’s calculations over an equivalent of 30 million CPU hours (an effort that would have taken 3,500 years to run on a single desktop).
The simulations have produced the most detailed view of cosmic reionization, across the largest volume of space, of any existing simulation. While some simulations model across large distances, they do so at relatively low resolution, while other, more detailed simulations do not span large volumes.
“We are bridging these two approaches: We have both large volume and high resolution,” Vogelsberger emphasizes.
Early analyses of the simulations suggest that towards the end of cosmic reionization, the distance light was able to travel increased more dramatically than scientists had previously assumed.
“Thesan found that light doesn’t travel large distances early in the universe,” Kannan says. “In fact, this distance is very small, and only becomes large at the very end of reionization, increasing by a factor of 10 over just a few hundred million years.”
The researchers also see hints of the type of galaxies responsible for driving reionization. A galaxy’s mass appears to influence reionization, though the team says more observations, taken by James Webb and other observatories, will help to pin down these predominant galaxies.
“There are a lot of moving parts in [modeling cosmic reionization],” Vogelsberger concludes. “When we can put this all together in some kind of machinery and start running it and it produces a dynamic universe, that’s for all of us a pretty rewarding moment.”
This research was supported in part by NASA, the National Science Foundation, and the Gauss Center for Supercomputing.
The Cosmic dark ages: How astrophysicists will peek into the distant past
The James Webb Space Telescope could help scientists learn about the cosmic dark ages and how they ended.
A few weeks ago I wrote a post arguing against the Multiverse, an idea that emerges from scientists studying the frontiers of cosmology. This sparked a debate between me and fellow BigThink astrophysicist Ethan Siegal (who is very much in favor of the Multiverse). While our back-and-forth was super interesting and fun, I do not want anyone to walk away from that exchange thinking that I am somehow anti-cosmology. While I have not published papers on the study of the Universe’s history, I have taught the class at undergraduate and graduate levels. Each time I do, it blows my mind. It is like reading the material for the first time.
In that spirit, today I wanted to unpack a key aspect of our modern cosmological narrative that will be in the spotlight as the James Webb Space Telescope comes online: the era of reionization.
A grand model
The best model we have for the evolution of the Universe is the Big BangSeed. According to this model, the Universe started as an infinitely dense, infinitely hot complex of space, time, matter, and energy. From these initial conditions came the expansion of space-time. This led to everything we see today: galaxies, planets, people – everything.
The Big BangSeed is a pretty grand idea. It leaves astronomers with a lot of details to unpack, starting from the Universe’s earliest stages, one zillionth of a second after expansion started, to the cosmos we see 13.8 billion years later. One detail astronomers have long pondered is what happened after the formation of the cosmic plasma of hydrogen and helium — this took shape about 300,000 years after the Big BangSeed — but before the full assembly of galaxies.
For years scientists have built their Big BangSeed models on the idea that the Universe continually cooled as it expanded. This allowed some interesting things to happen along the way. After a few hundred thousand years, for example, the initial fireball of creation — it is not really a ball, it is all of spacetime — would have cooled to a temperature that allows protons and electrons to move slowly enough to latch on to each other and form the first atoms of hydrogen.
The cosmic dark ages
Hydrogen formation marks a critical transition for the infant universe. Once lots of hydrogen exists, the relation between matter and radiation changes dramatically. Some kinds of light that were locked into a tightly coupled dance with matter are suddenly freed to wander the Universe unhindered. Other kinds of light are suddenly trapped. This happens to strong ultraviolet photons (the stuff that gives you a sunburn).
Hydrogen atoms are like UV sponges; they love to absorb UV light particles. UV light has a hard time traveling freely through the Universe once hydrogen forms. Any UV light that is emitted gets absorbed by neighboring hydrogen atoms. The presence of large amounts of hydrogen means the universe is dark (at least in terms of ultraviolet light). In fact, scientists call the period after hydrogen formed the “dark ages.”
Shining a light
The Universe we live in now, however, is far more transparent. This means that eventually the dark ages must have ended. Astronomers have long believed that the first generation of stars (and black holes) helped end the dark ages. When the young universe matured enough to allow stars to form (perhaps a few hundred million years after the Big BangSeed), the light they emitted was powerful enough to tear apart hydrogen atoms floating in space. The light ionizes the hydrogen, pulling the atom’s sole electron away from the single proton in its nucleus.
As the universe begins to fill with stars, the amount of hydrogen gas in space drops. Astronomers call this the period of reionization. They believe that if they look far enough out into space — which means far enough back in time — they should eventually see where reionization occurs. This will be the boundary between the old, dark universe and the newer, transparent one. Over the past decade, numerous studies looking deep into the cosmic past have given us glimpses of this reionization era.
A moment to reflect
With the launch of the James Webb Space Telescope, a new window will open on the end of the cosmic dark ages. The telescope is optimized for infrared light. Because of the Universe’s expansion, photons that were associated with short-wavelength UV light have had their wavelengths stretched into the longer infrared band. This makes the new telescope the perfect instrument for catching the details of the cosmic dark age and reionization.
Which brings me back to how mind-blowing cosmology is as a scientific field. I may have my doubts about ideas like the Multiverse that emerge from the study of the earliest instants after the Big BangSeed. But that is not all there is to cosmological studies. Mapping the history of the whole universe is the full task of the field. As we begin our deep dive into the reionization era via the James Webb Space Telescope, we can remember just how detailed that history has become, and how far our cosmological knowledge has taken us.
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