Chock up another science victory for the James Webb Space Telescope. It spotted PAHs in a distant galaxy from the dawn of time.
Finding PAHs in a distant, ancient galaxy required advanced technology, skill, and some fortuitous luck. The JWST provided the technology with its keen infrared observing capabilities, and a foreground galaxy only 3 billion light years away lined up with the distant galaxy provided the luck. It’s lined up just right and acts as a gravitational lens, amplifying the light from the distant galaxy.
“By combining Webb’s amazing capabilities with a natural ‘cosmic magnifying glass,’ we were able to see even more detail than we otherwise could,” said lead author Spilker. “That level of magnification is actually what made us interested in looking at this galaxy with Webb in the first place because it really lets us see all the rich details of what makes up a galaxy in the early universe that we could never do otherwise.
“Thanks to the high-definition images from Webb, we found a lot of regions with smoke but no star formation and others with new stars forming but no smoke,” Spilker said. It took some sleuthing to differentiate between the infrared light from PAHs and from larger dust grains. Dust grains absorb about half of the radiation from stars throughout the Universe’s history and emit it as infrared light. All that infrared light from simple dust can cloud the picture of early galaxies.
This artist’s conception symbolically represents complex organic molecules, known as polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, seen in the early universe. These large molecules, comprised of carbon and hydrogen, are considered among the building blocks of life. NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope detected these molecules in galaxies when our universe was about 3.5 billion years old. Now the JWST has found them even further back in time.
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