Look at star factories and more than 45,000 galaxies in this new Webb telescope image

Researchers at the University of Texas at Austin investigated galaxies that existed 500 to 850 million years after the big bang. This time is also known as the Epoch of Reionisation. Up to hundreds of million years after the big bang, our universe was filled with a gaseous fog that made it opaque.

But after about one billion years after the big bang, this fog had cleared and the universe became transparent. This process is called reionisation and that is where the epoch gets its name. The question is how did this reionisation happen?

Active supermassive black holes full of young, hot stars are considered to be a candidate behind the reason why this reionisation happened.

Researchers looked at these galaxies with Webb’s NIRSpec (Near-Infrared Spectrograph) to look for signs of star formation. They struck a motherlode. “Almost every single galaxy that we are finding shows these unusually strong emission line signatures indicating intense recent star formation. These early galaxies were very good at creating hot, massive stars,” said Ryan Endsley of the University of Texas at Austin, in a press statement.

#NASA says this #Webb image contains more than 45,000 galaxies. That means every 600 or so pixels contain an entire galaxy 🤯 pic.twitter.com/HMp5qCA1zy

— Sethu (@theSethu) June 6, 2023

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Those young, hot and massive stars are exceptionally bright, throwing out a flood of ultraviolet light, This ultraviolet light ionises the atoms in the gas that surrounds them, and this removes the electrons from their nuclei, turning the gas from opaque to transparent.

The results of this research are being presented at the 242nd meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Albuquerque, New Mexico, according to NASA.