Scientists didn't build the James Webb Space Telescope simply to find answers. They've sought new questions and mysteries.
And they've just found another.
Using the Webb telescope to peer back into the earliest periods of the universe, researchers spotted a handful of some of the brightest objects in the cosmos — quasars — adrift in the empty voids of space, isolated from other galaxies. This is strange. Quasars are black holes at galactic centers, millions to billions times more massive than the sun, that shoot potent bursts of energy into space (from material falling toward or rapidly spinning around black holes). The prevailing, and logical, theory was that such massive, hungry objects could only form in regions of dense matter.
But that's not always the case.
"Contrary to previous belief, we find on average, these quasars are not necessarily in those highest-density regions of the early universe. Some of them seem to be sitting in the middle of nowhere," Anna-Christina Eilers, a physicist at MIT who led the research, said in a statement. "It’s difficult to explain how these quasars could have grown so big if they appear to have nothing to feed from."
The research was recently published in a science journal called the Astrophysical Journal.
In the image below, you can see one of these isolated quasars, circled in red. Astronomers expect to find quasars amid regions flush with other galaxies. There, bounties of cosmic matter could support the creation of such giant and luminous objects. (In fact, "a quasar’s light outshines that of all the stars in its host galaxy combined," NASA explains.)
In this research, astronomers endeavored to view some of the oldest objects in the universe, created some 600 to 700 million years after the Big Bang. For perspective, our solar system wouldn't form for another 8.5 billion years or so.
The Webb telescope, which orbits 1 million miles from Earth, captures profoundly faint, stretched-out light as it existed eons ago. This light is just reaching us now.
"It’s just phenomenal that we now have a telescope that can capture light from 13 billion years ago in so much detail," Eilers said. "For the first time, JWST enabled us to look at the environment of these quasars, where they grew up, and what their neighborhood was like."
"It’s just phenomenal that we now have a telescope that can capture light from 13 billion years ago in so much detail."
This latest cosmic quandary is not just about how these quasars formed in isolation, but how they formed so rapidly. "The main question we’re trying to answer is, how do these billion-solar-mass black holes form at a time when the universe is still really, really young? It’s still in its infancy," Eilers said.
Although the Webb telescope is designed to peer through the thick clouds of dust and gas in the universe, the researchers do say it's possible that these enigmatic quasars are in fact surrounded by galaxies — but the galaxies are shrouded. To find out, more observation with Webb is necessary.
The Webb telescope's powerful abilities
The Webb telescope — a scientific collaboration between NASA, ESA, and the Canadian Space Agency — is designed to peer into the deepest cosmos and reveal new insights about the early universe. It's also examining intriguing planets in our galaxy, along with the planets and moons in our solar system.
Here's how Webb is achieving unparalleled feats, and likely will for decades to come:
- Giant mirror: Webb's mirror, which captures light, is over 21 feet across. That's over two-and-a-half times larger than the Hubble Space Telescope's mirror. Capturing more light allows Webb to see more distant, ancient objects. The telescope is peering at stars and galaxies that formed over 13 billion years ago, just a few hundred million years after the Big Bang. "We're going to see the very first stars and galaxies that ever formed," Jean Creighton, an astronomer and the director of the Manfred Olson Planetarium at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, told Mashable in 2021.
- Infrared view: Unlike Hubble, which largely views light that's visible to us, Webb is primarily an infrared telescope, meaning it views light in the infrared spectrum. This allows us to see far more of the universe. Infrared has longer wavelengths than visible light, so the light waves more efficiently slip through cosmic clouds; the light doesn't as often collide with and get scattered by these densely packed particles. Ultimately, Webb's infrared eyesight can penetrate places Hubble can't.
"It lifts the veil," said Creighton.
- Peering into distant exoplanets: The Webb telescope carries specialized equipment called spectrographs that will revolutionize our understanding of these far-off worlds. The instruments can decipher what molecules (such as water, carbon dioxide, and methane) exist in the atmospheres of distant exoplanets — be they gas giants or smaller rocky worlds. Webb looks at exoplanets in the Milky Way galaxy. Who knows what we'll find?
"We might learn things we never thought about," Mercedes López-Morales, an exoplanet researcher and astrophysicist at the Center for Astrophysics-Harvard & Smithsonian, told Mashable in 2021.
Already, astronomers have successfully found intriguing chemical reactions on a planet 700 light-years away, and have started looking at one of the most anticipated places in the cosmos: the rocky, Earth-sized planets of the TRAPPIST solar system.
