They are helped in this by old and retired instruments, such as the Hubble Space Telescope, but also by more advanced instruments that have only recently begun their work. The latter category undoubtedly includes the exceptionally advanced James Webb Space Telescope. Astronomers write about the results based on the activities of both telescopes in a post published here nature.
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What did the researchers discover? As Irena Chemerinska of the Institut de l’Astrophysique de Paris explained, her team demonstrated that the photons moving freely in the cosmic universe came from small dwarf galaxies. Under these conditions, the clouds of neutral hydrogen filling the space between galaxies were somewhat dispersed. This suggests that the role of these small galaxies in driving events billions of years ago was much more important than previously thought.
According to astronomers, these objects would be a source of ionizing photons responsible for converting neutral hydrogen into ionized plasma. The reionization era probably began about 150 million years after the Big Bang and lasted about 650 million years.
New results show that the Epoch of Reionization, a key phase in the evolution of the Universe, was driven by dwarf galaxies.
Learning the secrets of this period has been a challenge, largely because of… darkness. In such conditions, even the most advanced telescopes can’t see the oldest structures in the universe. Fortunately, the Webb telescope has revolutionized this field. Thanks to it, astronomers have proposed a scenario in which the era of reionization is driven by dwarf galaxies.
The research team paid particular attention to the Abell 2744 cluster, whose enormous mass bends and amplifies light as part of a gravitational lensing phenomenon. In such conditions, scientists have observed small, distant galaxies with low masses. The James Webb Space Telescope was used to analyze the spectra of these objects.
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Dwarf galaxies were very numerous. They were a hundred times more numerous than full-fledged galaxies, and their ionizing radiation emissions were about 4 times stronger. Researchers compare them to space power plants, which, due to their numbers, produce enormous amounts of radiation. Thanks to this, the era of rezoning could continue, although the interested parties themselves emphasize that more detailed research is needed.
Thanks to them, it will be possible to determine whether a similar phenomenon occurred throughout the universe at that time. To do this, it will be necessary to collect more representative samples, rather than focusing on a relatively small part of the sky. However, the recent developments may hold the key to understanding this very mysterious and at the same time very important stage in the evolution of the universe.
