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

Space is very hot right now. First unmanned Artemis mission On its way 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 The International Space Station collapsed this week, and that was it They broadcast live. they were Shit swings on asteroids To prove our ability. And our new friend, the James Webb Space Telescope, is doing its thing, quietly revising our entire understanding of how the universe works.

JWST floats a million miles from Earth and returns images that make Hubble look like the real thing. Of course, the web pictures that grabbed the headlines are Those who are breathtaking—beautiful or particularly cool photos that impress. Web still takes many of those. But these artistic images are, in a sense, a PR telescope to justify their existence to the general public. The real science happens in the analysis of less exciting data: things that aren’t even in the visible spectrum, or in the deep analysis of relatively unspectacular images. Yesterday’s big news comes from these action shots.

I realize I’m running the risk of underselling this, so: Naturally These pictures are beautiful even if they are not pillars of creation. And what they show – what is enlarged in Figure 2 at bottom center – is an absolute formula that dissolves into the brain. This is the galaxy GLASS-z12, and it is believed to be 13.45 billion years old, just 350 million years after the creation of the universe in the Big Bang. This is the farthest starlight we’ve ever seen.

But it wasn’t just the existence of a galaxy that got scientists excited — we already knew there would be galaxies out there at the time, and we knew that superior images 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 larger region to find such galaxies,” Marco Castellano said from the National Institute of Astrophysics in Rome, who directed a to who are they 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 in the early days of the universe would be there. This model predicted that a patch of sky about 10 times larger than what Webb captured would be needed to find it. Instead, scan the web quickly who are they Scientists discovered these galaxies a few days after the study data was published.

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 dark stellar ages–about 100 million years after the Big Bang, when the conditions of the early universe finally allowed gravity to begin building stars–than we imagined.

We were wrong! This is so cute! You know we were wrong, like 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 shimmering pictures, are how the JWST will help us write and rewrite the early history of our universe.

“These notes impress you.” Paola Santini saidCo-author of Castellano et al. paper. “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 incredible.”

These two new galaxies make interesting observations. and this is 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 possibility. It is assumed that at the beginning of the Universe, stars consisted only of hydrogen and helium, simply because they had not yet had time to produce heavier elements by nuclear fusion. These so-called 3 stars are said to be incredibly hot and incredibly bright, and although this is a long-held theory, it has never been observed. Maybe again.

This is, literally, hot shit. Thanks Web.