Webb sees carbon-rich dust grains in the first billion years of cosmic time
19 July 2023For the first time, the James Webb Space Telescope has observed the chemical signature of carbon-rich dust grains in the early universe.
For the first time, the James Webb Space Telescope has observed the chemical signature of carbon-rich dust grains in the early universe.
Among the most fundamental questions in astronomy is: How did the first stars and galaxies form? The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), a partnership between NASA, the European Space Agency and the Canadian Space Agency, is already providing new insights into this question.
New findings confirm that JWST has surpassed the Hubble telescope in its ability to observe the early Universe
Researchers have been able to make some key determinations about the first galaxies to exist, in one of the first astrophysical studies of the period in the early Universe when the first stars and galaxies formed, known as the cosmic dawn.
Astrophysicists say that cosmic inflation – a point in the Universe’s infancy when space-time expanded exponentially, and what physicists really refer to when they talk about the ‘Big Bang’ – can in principle be ruled out in an assumption-free way.
One of the most distant known galaxies, observed in the very earliest years of the Universe, appears to be rotating at less than a quarter of the speed of the Milky Way today, according to a new study involving University of Cambridge researchers.
The nine Cambridge researchers were all selected for their exceptional contributions to science.
Black holes with masses equivalent to millions of suns do put a brake on the birth of new stars, say astronomers. Using machine learning and three state-of-the-art simulations to back up results from a large sky survey, researchers from the University of Cambridge have resolved a 20-year long debate on the formation of stars.
Dark energy, the mysterious force that causes the universe to accelerate, may have been responsible for unexpected results from the XENON1T experiment, deep below Italy’s Apennine Mountains.
Cosmic dawn, when stars formed for the first time, occurred 250 million to 350 million years after the beginning of the universe, according to a new study led by researchers from the University of Cambridge and University College London (UCL).