A ‘supernova’ telescope has uncovered multiple explosions in distant space.
Created by Nasa, the James Webb telescope was built to “see back in time”, up to 13.5 billion years ago.
Costing $10bn (USD) (£7.8bn) it has made a few notable discoveries in its time, including, most recently, a collision that occurred between two asteroids twenty years ago.
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Now, it’s uncovered 80 early and distant star explosions in “a patch of sky as wide as a grain of rice held at arm’s length”, reports What’s The Jam.
This is 10 times more supernovas than have been discovered that early before, including one that exploded when the universe was just 1.8 billion years old.
Prior to the JWST Advanced Extragalactic survey (JADES) starting operations in 2022, only a handful of these stars had been found so early on in time.
“The JWST is a supernova discovery machine,” said Christa DeCoursey, a team member of the group.
“The sheer number of detections plus the great distances to these supernovas are the two most exciting outcomes from our survey.”
Due to the James Webb’s impressive infrared sensitivity, supernovas are being uncovered in almost every part of the cosmos.
When light wavelengths travel through the cosmos, the fabric of space stretches these out, causing light to move further down the electromagnetic spectrum, known as “redshift”.
The longer the light has been travelling, the more extreme the degree of redshift, allowing light from over 12 billion light-years away, such as these supernovas, to be viewed.
At year-long intervals, the JADES team took photos of this patch in the sky and then compared the images to help them determine which points of light were, in fact, exploding stars or some other phenomena.
Previously, the Hubble Space telescope had allowed astronomers to view supernovas so distant, they existed when the universe was only a “young adult”.
But thanks to the “cosmic detective” the cosmos is now able to be viewed when it was only a teenager.
In the future, it’s hoped the “toddler” phase will be visible; but for now, a new universe is unfolding right before our eyes.
“We’re essentially opening a new window on the transient universe,” Matthew Siebert, leader of the spectroscopic analysis of the JADES supernovas, said.
“Historically, whenever we’ve done that, we’ve found extremely exciting things – things that we didn’t expect.”
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