Enlarge / Some of the galaxies in the JADES images. (credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, M. Zamani)

One of the things that the James Webb Space Telescope was designed to do was look at some of the earliest objects in the Universe. And it has already succeeded spectacularly, imaging galaxies as they existed just 250 million years after the Big Bang. But these galaxies were small, compact, and similar in scope to what we'd consider a dwarf galaxy today, which made it difficult to determine what was producing their light: stars or an actively feeding supermassive black hole at their core.

This week, Nature is publishing confirmation that some additional galaxies we've imaged also date back to just 300 million years after the Big Bang. Critically, one of them is bright and relatively large, allowing us to infer that most of its light was coming from a halo of stars surrounding its core, rather than originating in the same area as the central black hole. The finding implies that it formed through a continuing burst of star formation that started just 200 million years after the Big Bang.

Age checks

The galaxies at issue here were first imaged during the JADES (JWST Advanced Deep Extragalactic Survey) imaging program, which includes part of the area imaged for the Hubble Ultra Deep Field. Initially, old galaxies were identified by using a combination of filters on one of Webb's infrared imaging cameras.

Enlarge / A jet of particles moving at nearly light-speed emerges from a massive star in this artist’s concept of the BOAT. (credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center Conceptual Image Lab)

Scientists have been all aflutter since several space-based detectors picked up a powerful gamma-ray burst (GRB) in October 2022—a burst so energetic that astronomers nicknamed it the BOAT (Brightest Of All Time). Now an international team of astronomers has analyzed an unusual energy peak detected by NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope and concluded that it was an emission spectra, according to a new paper published in the journal Science. Per the authors, it's the first high-confidence emission line ever seen in 50 years of studying GRBs.

As reported previously, gamma-ray bursts are extremely high-energy explosions in distant galaxies lasting between mere milliseconds to several hours. There are two classes of gamma-ray bursts. Most (70 percent) are long bursts lasting more than two seconds, often with a bright afterglow. These are usually linked to galaxies with rapid star formation. Astronomers think that long bursts are tied to the deaths of massive stars collapsing to form a neutron star or black hole (or, alternatively, a newly formed magnetar). The baby black hole would produce jets of highly energetic particles moving near the speed of light, powerful enough to pierce through the remains of the progenitor star, emitting X-rays and gamma rays.

Those gamma-ray bursts lasting less than two seconds (about 30 percent) are deemed short bursts, usually emitting from regions with very little star formation. Astronomers think these gamma-ray bursts are the result of mergers between two neutron stars, or a neutron star merging with a black hole, comprising a "kilonova." That hypothesis was confirmed in 2017 when the LIGO collaboration picked up the gravitational wave signal of two neutron stars merging, accompanied by the powerful gamma-ray bursts associated with a kilonova.

Enlarge / Image of Epsilon Indi A at two wavelengths, with the position of its host star indicated by an asterisk. (credit: T. Müller (MPIA/HdA), E. Matthews (MPIA))

We have a couple of techniques that allow us to infer the presence of an exoplanet based on its effects on the light coming from its host star. But there's an alternative approach that sometimes works: image them directly. It's much more limited, since the planet has to be pretty big and orbiting far away enough from its star to avoid having light coming from the planet swamped by the far more intense starlight.

Still, it has been done. Massive exoplanets have been captured relatively shortly after their formation, when the heat generated by the collapse of material into the planet causes them to glow in the infrared. But the Webb telescope is far more sensitive than any infrared observatory we've ever built, and it has managed to image a relatively nearby exoplanet that's roughly as old as the ones in our Solar System.

Looking directly at a planet

What do you need to directly image a planet that's orbiting a star light-years away? The first thing is a bit of hardware called a coronagraph attached to your telescope. This is responsible for blocking the light from the star the planet is orbiting; without it, that light will swamp any other sources in the exosolar system. Even with a good coronagraph, you need the planets to be orbiting at a significant distance from the star so that they're cleanly separated from the signal being blocked by the coronagraph.

In December 2019, astronomers were surprised to observe a long-quiet galaxy, 300 million light-years away, suddenly come alive, emitting ultraviolet, optical, and infrared light into space. Far from quieting down again, by February of this year, the galaxy had begun emitting X-ray light; it is becoming more active. Astronomers think it is most likely an active galactic nucleus (AGN), which gets its energy from supermassive black holes at the galaxy's center and/or from the black hole's spin. That's the conclusion of a new paper accepted for publication in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics, although the authors acknowledge the possibility that it might also be some kind of rare tidal disruption event (TDE).

The brightening of SDSS1335_0728 in the constellation Virgo, after decades of quietude, was first detected by the Zwicky Transient Facility telescope. Its supermassive black hole is estimated to be about 1 million solar masses. To get a better understanding of what might be going on, the authors combed through archival data and combined that with data from new observations from various instruments, including the X-shooter, part of the Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile's Atacama Desert.

There are many reasons why a normally quiet galaxy might suddenly brighten, including supernovae or a TDE, in which part of the shredded star's original mass is ejected violently outward. This, in turn, can form an accretion disk around the black hole that emits powerful X-rays and visible light. But these events don't last nearly five years—usually not more than a few hundred days.

Enlarge (credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, Joseph Olmsted (STScI))

Supermassive black holes appear to be present at the center of every galaxy, going back to some of the earliest galaxies in the Universe. And we have no idea how they got there. It shouldn't be possible for them to grow from supernova remnants to supermassive sizes as quickly as they do. And we're not aware of any other mechanism that could form something big enough that extreme growth wouldn't be necessary.

The seeming impossibility of supermassive black holes in the early Universe was already a bit of a problem; the James Webb Space Telescope has only made it worse by finding ever-earlier instances of galaxies with supermassive black holes. In the latest example, researchers have used the Webb to characterize a quasar powered by a supermassive black hole as it existed approximately 750 million years after the Big Bang. And it looks shockingly normal.

Looking back in time

Quasars are the brightest objects in the Universe, powered by actively feeding supermassive black holes. The galaxy surrounding them feeds them enough material that they form bright accretion disks and powerful jets, both of which emit copious amounts of radiation. They're often partly shrouded in dust, which glows from absorbing some of the energy emitted by the black hole. These quasars emit so much radiation that they ultimately drive some of the nearby material out of the galaxy entirely.

Enlarge / NASA's James Webb Space Telescope reveals the Rho Ophiuchi cloud complex, the closest star-forming region to Earth.

In a feat of galactic archeology, astronomers are using ever more detailed information to trace the origin of our galaxy—and to learn about how other galaxies formed in the early stages of the Universe. Using powerful space telescopes like Gaia and James Webb, astronomers are able to peer back in time and look at some of the oldest stars and galaxies. Between Gaia’s data on the position and movements of stars within our Milky Way and Webb’s observations of early galaxies that formed when the Universe was still young, astronomers are learning how galaxies come together and have made surprising discoveries that suggest the early Universe was busier and brighter than anyone previously imagined.

The Milky Way’s earliest pieces

In a recent paper, researchers using the Gaia space telescope identified two streams of stars, named Shakti and Shiva, each of which contains a total mass of around 10 million Suns and which are thought to have merged into the Milky Way around 12 billion years ago.

These streams were present even before the Milky Way had features like a disk or its spiral arms, and researchers think they could be some of the earliest building blocks of the galaxy as it developed.

Enlarge / Hubble Space Telescope above Earth, photographed during STS-125, Servicing Mission 4, May 2009. (credit: NASA)

The venerable Hubble Space Telescope is running out of gyroscopes, and when none are left, the instrument will cease to conduct meaningful science.

To preserve the telescope, which has been operating in space for nearly three and a half decades, NASA announced Tuesday that it will reduce the Hubble's operations such that it will function on just a single gyroscope. This will limit some scientific operations, and it will take longer to point the telescope to new objects and lock onto them.

But in a conference call with space reporters, Hubble officials stressed that the beloved scientific instrument is not going anywhere any time soon.

Enlarge / Behold, the most distant galaxy found to date. (credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI et al.)

Welcome to the Daily Telescope. There is a little too much darkness in this world and not enough light, a little too much pseudoscience and not enough science. We'll let other publications offer you a daily horoscope. At Ars Technica, we're going to take a different route, finding inspiration from very real images of a universe that is filled with stars and wonder.

Good morning. It's June 1, and today's photo comes from the James Webb Space Telescope. It's a banger.

This telescope, launched 18 months ago now, had as one of its express goals to deliver insights about the early Universe. The most straightforward way of doing so is to collect the faintest, most distant light that has spent the longest time traveling to reach Earth.

A field of sand dunes in the Martian springtime. (credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona)

Welcome to the Daily Telescope. There is a little too much darkness in this world and not enough light, a little too much pseudoscience and not enough science. We'll let other publications offer you a daily horoscope. At Ars Technica, we're going to take a different route, finding inspiration from very real images of a universe that is filled with stars and wonder.

Good morning. It's May 29, and today's photo comes from NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, which is, you guessed it, in orbit around Mars.

The image shows an area of sand dunes on Mars in the springtime, when carbon dioxide frost is sublimating into the air. According to NASA, the pattern of dark spots is due to the fact that the sublimation process is not uniform.

Enlarge / The Sky-Watcher HEQ5 Pro and the Unistellar Odyssey Pro. (credit: Tim Stevens)

It's been 300 years since Galileo and Isaac Newton started fiddling around with lenses and parabolic mirrors to get a better look at the heavens. But if you look at many of the best amateur telescopes today, you'd be forgiven for thinking they haven't progressed much since.

Though components have certainly improved, the basic combination of mirrors and lenses is more or less the same. Even the most advanced "smart" mounts that hold them rely on technology that hasn't progressed in 30 years.

Compared to the radical reinvention that even the humble telephone has received, it's sad that telescope tech has largely been left behind. But that is finally changing. Companies like Unistellar and Vaonis are pioneering a new generation of scopes that throw classic astronomy norms and concepts out the window in favor of a seamless setup and remarkable image quality.

Enlarge / Messier 78 is a nursery of star formation enveloped in a shroud of interstellar dust. (credit: ESA/Euclid/Euclid Consortium/NASA et. al.)

Welcome to the Daily Telescope. There is a little too much darkness in this world and not enough light, a little too much pseudoscience and not enough science. We'll let other publications offer you a daily horoscope. At Ars Technica, we're going to take a different route, finding inspiration from very real images of a universe that is filled with stars and wonder.

Good morning. It's May 24, and today's photo comes from the European Space Agency's new Euclid space telescope.

Launched in July 2023, the mission is intended to create a giant map of the Universe, across more than one-third of the nighttime sky. Its big-ticket goal is to help scientists better understand the nature of dark matter and dark energy, which account for the vast majority of the mass in the Universe—but about which we know almost nothing.