Podcaster: Richard Drumm
Title: UNAWE Space Scoop – Teenage Galaxy Found Hiding in a Cosmic Nursery
Organization: 365 Days Of Astronomy
Link : http://365daysofastronomy.org/ ; https://spacescoop.org/en/scoops/2504/teenage-galaxy-found-hiding-in-a-cosmic-nursery/
Description: Space scoop, news for children.
Telescopes are, in a way, time-travel machines to the distant past & faraway galaxies. And that’s how we discovered faraway galaxy when our Universe is still very young.
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Transcript:
This is the 365 Days of Astronomy Podcast. Today we bring you a new episode in our Space Scoop series. This show is produced in collaboration with Universe Awareness, a program that strives to inspire every child with our wonderful cosmos.
Today’s story is…Teenage Galaxy Found Hiding in a Cosmic Nursery
Telescopes are, in a way, time-travel machines to the distant past & faraway galaxies.
The speed of light is the Universe’s speed limit.
Forget that 55 MPH thing.
186,000 miles per second is more like it!
Lightspeed is also the speed of gravity and electricity, so there’s that.
For example, it takes light from the Sun over 8 minutes to reach Earth, so the sunlight we feel on our faces is, on average, actually 8 minutes 25 seconds old.
When astronomers use telescopes to look at galaxies in space, they find some that are close by and some that are farther away—that is, some that are younger and some that are very much older.
Astronomers have observed galaxies that are a few hundred million years old!
That’s how old the Universe was when the light we see left the galaxy.
Heck, I’ve seen quasar 3C 273 in my own backyard telescope.
It’s 2.4 billion light years away.
So I’ve seen with my own eyes back to a time out there that is the time when the only life here on Earth were archaea, bacteria & viruses.
There was no life on the surface.
The surface of planet Earth was sand, gravel & rocks.
There wasn’t even any dirt! Life was only found in the ocean.
Cyanobacteria had just started the Great Oxidation Event, so the atmosphere would not be able to support us humans.
Cells had no nuclei or mitochondria.
No endoplasmic reticulum or Golgi apparatus either!
Sex hadn’t been invented yet!
So sexual reproduction simply wasn’t a thing.
Reproduction was by asexual binary fission.
Horizontal gene transfer was how these primitive species evolved.
I mean, this was a loooong time ago!
Where was I?
Oh yeah. The most distant galaxy.
By studying the light from all kinds of galaxies, astronomers can glimpse the history of our Universe, and build up a ‘cosmic timeline’ of how galaxies form.
Until recently, astronomers thought they had a pretty good idea of what this timeline should look like.
But a new study has made them rethink some of the facts.
Two different teams of researchers were studying the most distant and, therefore, the youngest galaxy we know of, JADES-GS-z14-0.
Let’s call it GS-z14 for short…
It’s located in the southern constellation Fornax.
The JADES acronym comes from the JWST Advanced Deep Extragalactic Survey program. So there’s an initialism nested inside the acronym. Cool!
When the light we’re observing now left GS-z14, a whopping 13.4 billion years ago, our Solar System didn’t even exist yet!
That means the Universe was 300 million years old when the light left GS-z14!
That’s 2% of its current age!
After the JWST found the galaxy, the astronomers then used ALMA, the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array radio telescope in the high planes of Chile’s Atacama desert.
So, when the two teams of researchers analyzed their data, they were surprised to find something unique that other young galaxies did not have.
What was it?
Oxygen.
Now, that might not sound like a big deal. Oxygen is everywhere around us!
But there are certain things that galaxies can only have at specific ages – almost like a driver’s license that you have to be 18 to get.
Oxygen is produced in older massive stars and dispersed into the cosmos through supernova explosions when they die.
But for 10 times more oxygen than expected to be found in a galaxy as young as GS-z14, the stars we’re observing must be older than we thought they should be.
The researchers essentially found a baby that had grown to the size of a teenager in a much shorter time than expected.
Maybe it’d had a growth spurt? A teenager can pack on the pounds!
Finding this rapidly growing galaxy gives astronomers more questions than answers about the first years of our Universe.
Could galaxies have formed earlier in the cosmic timeline?
Maybe they don’t grow the way we think.
How does this change what we know?
Well, that’s just the beauty of astronomy!
Finding amazing questions where you would expect to find answers.
Astronomers can only go back to work & do more research!
Hey, here’s a cool fact!
It isn’t just oxygen that’s made inside stars!
Their super-hot cores have created the calcium in our teeth, the sodium and the chlorine in our salt; and everything we can see, touch, and feel.
That’s why stars are full of surprises…
Ahem…
They make up everything!
Thank you for listening to the 365 Days of Astronomy Podcast!
End of podcast:
365 Days of Astronomy
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The 365 Days of Astronomy Podcast is produced by Planetary Science Institute. Audio post production by me, Richard Drumm, project management by Avivah Yamani, and hosting donated by libsyn.com. This content is released under a creative commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International license. Please share what you love but don’t sell what’s free.
This show is made possible thanks to the generous donations of people like you! Please consider supporting our show on Patreon.com/CosmoQuestX and get access to bonus content. Without your passion and contribution, we won’t be able to share the stories and inspire the worlds. We invite you to join our community of storytellers and share your voice with listeners worldwide.
As we wrap up today’s episode, we are looking forward to unravel more stories from the Universe. With every new discovery from ground-based and space-based observatories, and each milestone in space exploration, we come closer to understanding the cosmos and our place within it.
Until next time let the stars guide your curiosity!