![]() Here on Earth, they are part of cancer-causing hydrocarbon emissions that contribute to the planet’s atmospheric pollution. and Cynthia Woods Mitchell Institute for Fundamental Physics and Astronomy.Īstronomers spotted the signature of the organic molecules during a careful analysis of Webb’s data. “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,” said Spilker, who is also a member of Texas A&M’s George P. “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 study author Justin Spilker, an assistant professor of physics and astronomy at Texas A&M University, in a statement. Gravitational lensing was originally predicted in Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity. “This magnification happens when two galaxies are almost perfectly aligned from the Earth’s point of view, and light from the background galaxy is warped and magnified by the foreground galaxy into a ring-like shape, known as an Einstein ring,” said study coauthor Joaquin Vieira, professor of astronomy and physics at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, in a statement. The galaxy observed by the Webb telescope shows an Einstein ring caused by a phenomenon known as gravitational lensing, which occurs when two galaxies are almost perfectly aligned from our perspective on Earth. And the space observatory received a helping hand from a phenomenon called gravitational lensing. Other observatories, such as the Hubble Space Telescope and the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array in Chile, have observed it since.īut the Webb telescope’s infrared capabilities, which can see light invisible to the human eye and peer through cosmic dust, was able to capture new details about the galaxy. The galaxy was first spotted in 2013 by the National Science Foundation’s South Pole Telescope. The light from the dusty galaxy began traveling across the cosmos when the universe was less than 1.5 billion years old, just 10% of its current age of 13.8 billion years. The base of the organic molecules is carbon, considered to be one of the building blocks of life because it’s a key element in amino acids, which form proteins.Ī study detailing the findings was published Monday in the journal Nature. ![]() On Earth, the molecules, called polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, can be found in smoke, soot, smog, engine exhaust and forest fires. The discovery sheds light on the chemical interactions that occurred within the earliest galaxies in the universe and how they relate to star formation. The complex molecules were found in a galaxy known as SPT0418-47, located more than 12 billion light-years away. It’s the first time Webb has detected complex molecules in the distant universe. Astronomers have detected the most distant known organic molecules in the universe using the James Webb Space Telescope. ![]()
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