The most exciting thing about science is when we find out we’re wrong

The room is very hot right now. Unmanned Artemis I Mission En route to lunar orbit, it’s the first of a series of missions that plan to return humans to the moon by the end of the decade. spacewalk inside The International Space Station crashed this week and it They broadcast live. they were Shit is swinging on asteroids To prove our ability. And our new friend, the James Webb Space Telescope, is doing its job, quietly rethinking our entire understanding of how the universe works.

Hovering a million miles from Earth, the JWST returns images that make Hubble look like real shit. Naturally, Webb’s photos are making headlines Those who are breathtaking—Particularly beautiful or amazing and impressive photos. The web still lasts many of those. But these artistic images are sort of the public relations telescope to justify their existence to the general public. The real science lies in the analysis of less exciting data: things that don’t even exist in the visible spectrum, or in the careful analysis of relatively unspectacular images. Yesterday’s big news comes from these action plans.

I realize I run the risk of undermining this, so: naturally These photos are great, even if they aren’t pillars of creation. And what they show – that is, what is magnified in figure 2 at the bottom center – is an absolute formula that merges with the brain. This is the galaxy GLASS-z12, and it is thought to be 13.45 billion years old, just 350 million years after the creation of the universe in the Big Bang. This is the most distant starlight we have ever seen.

But it wasn’t just the existence of a galaxy that excited scientists – we already knew there would be galaxies around then, and we knew the superior imagery from JWST would reveal them. What was unexpected was how easy it was to find.

“Based on all the predictions, we thought we needed to search a much wider area to find such galaxies,” says Marco Castellano of the National Institute of Astrophysics in Rome, who directed A Of of them Research articles published Thursday in Letters from the Astrophysical Journal. Scientists had a model, based on current knowledge, of how many of these bright, fully formed galaxies would be there in the early days of the universe. This model predicted that it would take an expanse of sky about 10 times larger than what Webb recorded to find it. Instead, quickly scan the web of them These galaxies were discovered by scientists a few days after the publication of the study data.

What this means is that our models were wrong and that bright, densely populated galaxies may have formed faster and more frequently after the end of the Stellar Dark Ages – about 100 million years after the Big Bang, when the conditions of the early universe eventually allowed gravity to create stars build – than we imagined.

We were wrong! This is so cute! You know we were wrong as was the whole literal point of science! Knowing that our models and predictions were inaccurate allows us to create new models to better explain the observations, bringing us closer to the truth. Iterative science, and these small discoveries, rather than big shiny pictures, are how the JWST will help us write and rewrite the early history of our universe.

“These notes will blow your mind.” says Paola Santini, co-author of the article by Castellano et al. “It’s a whole new chapter in astronomy. It’s like an archaeological dig and all of a sudden you find a lost city or something you didn’t know about. It’s amazing.”

These two new galaxies make interesting observations. And it’s Much brighter than we expected, and brighter than anything near Earth. “Its extreme brightness is a real headache,” said Pascal Ochs, co-author of the second article published today. But there is an interesting opportunity. It is believed that at the beginning of the universe, the stars were composed only of hydrogen and helium, simply because they had not yet had time to produce heavier elements by nuclear fusion. These so-called population 3 stars are said to be incredibly hot and incredibly bright, and although this has been a theory for a long time, it has never been noticed. Maybe again.

This is literally hot shit. Thanks website.