Scientists have recorded light from objects older than known galaxies

The James Webb telescope has detected ultraviolet radiation from nine objects that may have existed before the first stars appeared. This was reported on August 4 in the journal Scientific American.

Astrophysicists have identified nine new light sources, six of which have a redshift of 17, and three have a redshift of 25. This corresponds to the age of the universe from 200 to 100 million years. If the calculations are correct, these objects existed long before the start of star formation — at a stage when stars and galaxies could not yet form. This contradicts the existing models of the evolution of the universe.

"If it is confirmed that they are indeed at such distances, it means that in the first 200 million years the universe was much more active than previously thought," the publication notes.

To explain the source of the detected light, another group of researchers hypothesized about primordial black holes, a special type of objects that could have formed in the first seconds after the Big Bang. These holes could capture gas, heat it up, and thereby emit the light that a telescope observes today.

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As specified in the material, the problem is that at such an early stage, the gas in the universe remained too hot to collapse into clouds and form stars. Usually, dark matter structures form first, then gravity draws gas into them, and only then does a stellar population arise. This process takes hundreds of millions of years.

The primordial black holes themselves could be the size of an atom, but then grow to the masses of tens of thousands of suns. At the same time, the radiation from gas accretion may look like stellar radiation, and it is almost impossible to distinguish them from current images. In addition, about 30% of the observed objects look like points and potentially correspond to the profile of a black hole, but the rest do not.

To confirm or refute the hypothesis, scientists will have to perform spectroscopy and clarify the characteristics of the objects. At the same time, the data may help explain another problem — the origin of supermassive black holes in the centers of ancient galaxies.

On August 3, Sergey Yazev, a senior researcher at the Institute of Solar-Terrestrial Physics of the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, professor at Irkutsk State University (IGU), announced that the new comet 3I/ATLAS does not pose a threat to the Earth and the world's population.

Earlier, on August 2, Harvard astrophysicist Loeb stated that a potentially dangerous interstellar object 3I/ATLAS could reach Earth by the end of 2025. According to him, it may turn out to be an alien ship capable of carrying a probe or a weapon.

All important news is on the Izvestia channel in the MAX messenger.