And now, as with all ground-breaking real science, this discovery simply points us toward new, and different. . . questions: how indeed, did what we now think of as our early universe cool and coalesce into the strands of diamonds we now see in our night sky, some 13 billion years on? And why were these tiny lil' pools of tightly shimmering light. . . left behind? We may need to ask the "platypus" deviner -- one Haojing Yan, Ph.D.:
. . .After combing through NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope’s archive of sweeping extragalactic cosmic fields, a small team of astronomers at the University of Missouri says they have identified a sample of galaxies that have a previously unseen combination of features. Principal investigator Haojing Yan compares the discovery to an infamous oddball in another branch of science: biology’s taxonomy-defying platypus. . . .
“It seems that we’ve identified a population of galaxies that we can’t categorize, they are so odd. On the one hand they are extremely tiny and compact, like a point source, yet we do not see the characteristics of a quasar, an active supermassive black hole, which is what most distant point sources are,” said Yan.
The research was presented in a press conference at the 247th meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Phoenix. . . .
The team whittled down a sample of 2,000 sources across several Webb surveys to identify nine point-like sources that existed 12 to 12.6 billion years ago (compared to the universe’s age of 13.8 billion years). Spectral data gives astronomers more information than they can get from an image alone, and for these nine sources it doesn’t fit existing definitions. They are too far away to be stars in our own galaxy, and too faint to be quasars, which are so brilliant that they outshine their host galaxies. . . .
Onward -- to that undiscovered country -- the future, then. Grin.
नमस्ते
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