Keith Cooper is a freelance science journalist and editor in the United Kingdom, and has a degree in physics and astrophysics from the University of Manchester. He's the author of 'The Contact Paradox: Challenging Our Assumptions in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence' (Bloomsbury Sigma, 2020) and has written articles on astronomy, space, physics and astrobiology for a multitude of magazines and websites.
and galaxies had formed, the universe was dark and shrouded in a fog of neutral hydrogen gas. Ultimately light, particularly ultraviolet radiation, ionized that fog. But where did that light initially come from to end the cosmic dark ages? supermassive black holes
, which are surrounded by accretion disks of brilliantly hot gas and shoot powerful jets into space. The question of which came first — galaxies or their black holes — is one of the biggest conundrums in cosmology, a kind of chicken or egg question. Already, JWST has found that the early galaxies it is detecting are brighter and more structured than expected, with distinct disks around bulbous cores already filled with stars. This characteristic suggests that fully-formed galaxies were on the scene quickly — but whether they already contained supermassive black holes remains to be seen. Fortunately, JWST is designed to answer this question, and when it does it will provide a huge piece of the jigsaw that is the puzzle of the early universe.
When a planet passes in front of its star, some of the star's light filters through the planet's atmosphere, and molecules in the atmosphere can absorb some of that starlight, creating dark lines in the star's spectrum, a barcode-like breakdown of light by wavelength.
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