In a galaxy hanging out in the early Universe less than 1.5 billion years after the Big Bang, the James Webb Space Telescope has made an astonishing detection.
much more challenging. These molecules absorb light and re-emit it in infrared wavelengths, and previous infrared telescopes had vastly limited sensitivity and coverage. However, we now have the JWST, the most powerful space telescope ever built, strongest in infrared wavelengths.But that's not quite enough on its own. JWST had to tap into a quirk of physics to make such a detailed observation: gravitational lensing.
Space-time does something similar around massive objects such as galaxies and galaxy clusters, but there's a bonus. Because space-time is warped and stretched, any light traveling through it also becomes warped, magnified, and sometimes duplicated. This means we can effectively use these lenses as a sort of cosmic magnifying glass, adding a lot of oomph to the power of our telescopes.
Between us and SPT0418-47 is another galaxy, at a distance of around 3 billion light-years, providing that lensing oomph. This means when JWST took observations of the galaxy as part of theEarly Release Science program, it was able to get enough detail that Spilker and his colleagues could tease out the spectral signature of the light emitted by PAHs at a mid-infrared wavelength of 3.3 micrometers.
This constitutes the most distant detection to date of complex aromatic molecules, and although there's a lot we still don't know – the reason for the uneven distribution of PAHs throughout the galaxy is unknown – it bodes excitingly well for future studies of the evolution of galaxies in the early Universe.
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