telescopes – Quanta Magazine

JWST Spots Giant Black Holes All Over the Early Universe

Charlie Wood — Mon, 14 Aug 2023 14:29:48 +0000

Years before she was even sure the James Webb Space Telescope would successfully launch, Christina Eilers started planning a conference for astronomers specializing in the early universe. She knew that if — preferably, when — JWST started making observations, she and her colleagues would have a lot to talk about. Like a time machine, the telescope could see farther away and farther into the past...

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Astronomers Say They Have Spotted the Universe’s First Stars

Jonathan O'Callaghan — Mon, 30 Jan 2023 15:00:39 +0000

A group of astronomers poring over data from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has glimpsed light from ionized helium in a distant galaxy, which could indicate the presence of the universe’s very first generation of stars. These long-sought, inaptly named “Population III” stars would have been ginormous balls of hydrogen and helium sculpted from the universe’s primordial gas.

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Standard Model of Cosmology Survives a Telescope’s Surprising Finds

Rebecca Boyle — Fri, 20 Jan 2023 15:49:50 +0000

The cracks in cosmology were supposed to take a while to appear. But when the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) opened its lens last spring, extremely distant yet very bright galaxies immediately shone into the telescope’s field of view. “They were just so stupidly bright, and they just stood out,” said Rohan Naidu, an astronomer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

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A Dream of Discovering Alien Life Finds New Hope

Joshua Sokol — Thu, 03 Nov 2022 15:12:26 +0000

One of the many times Lisa Kaltenegger’s dream jolted a little closer toward reality was on a cold April morning a decade ago at an astronomy conference. She was clutching what she recalls was a terrible, just awful cup of coffee, not because she was going to drink any more of it but because she had waited in line and it was warm in her hands. Then Bill Borucki veered in her direction.

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Black Hole Image Reveals the Beast Inside the Milky Way’s Heart

Jonathan O'Callaghan — Thu, 12 May 2022 13:28:31 +0000

Today, more than three years after the release of the first-ever image of a black hole, scientists from the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) shared an image of Sagittarius A* (pronounced A-star) — the supermassive specimen sitting at the center of our own Milky Way galaxy. “It is a dream that comes true after decades of work,” said Heino Falcke, an astrophysicist at Radboud University in the...

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