It seems many of the stars from the early Universe's epoch of star formation may have emerged from large super-heated clouds rather than exclusively from colder matter collapses, driven by gravity alone. Here's the fulsome story from across the pond, at the European Space Agency:
. . .Looking deep into the early Universe with the NASA/ESA/CSA JWST, astronomers have found something unprecedented: a galaxy with an odd light signature, which they attribute to its gas outshining its stars.
[Viewing light from] approximately one billion years after the Big Bang, galaxy GS-NDG-9422 (9422) may be [showing us all] a missing-link phase of galactic evolution between the Universe’s first stars and familiar, well-established galaxies.
“My first thought in looking at the galaxy’s spectrum was, ‘that’s weird,’ which is exactly what the Webb telescope was designed to reveal: totally new phenomena in the early Universe that will help us understand how the cosmic story began,” said lead researcher Alex Cameron of the University of Oxford, UK.
Cameron reached out to colleague Harley Katz, a theorist, to discuss the strange data. Working together, their team found that computer models of cosmic gas clouds heated by very hot, massive stars -- to an extent that the gas shone brighter than the stars -- was nearly a perfect match to Webb’s observations.
“It looks like these stars must be much hotter and more massive than what we see in the local Universe, which makes sense because the early Universe was a very different environment,” said Harley, of Oxford, UK, and the University of Chicago, USA. . . .
Indeed, we are still catching up on last week's news -- due to our time away. . . but it does thrill me, to see how much we are learning every day, from this next gen space 'scope. And to be certain, it humbles me to think about how much we really don't know -- about our own cosmic neighborhoods. Onward.
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