Carbon Found at the Dawn of the Universe, Life May Have Emerged Much Earlier

TPO - The James Webb Telescope has found carbon in a galaxy just 350 million years after the Big Bang. A new study argues that this proves life may have begun much earlier.

Deep-field image from JWST looks back at the early universe (Image: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Brant Robertson (UC Santa Cruz), Ben Johnson (CfA), Sandro Tacchella (Cambridge), Phill Cargile (CfA))

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has discovered a key building block of life at the dawn of the universe, upending what we know about the first galaxies.

The discovery – a cloud of carbon in a small, distant galaxy as it appeared just 350 million years after the Big Bang – marks the earliest detection of an element other than hydrogen in the universe.

“Previous research suggested that carbon started forming in large quantities relatively late – about a billion years after the Big Bang,” said co-author Roberto Maiolino, professor of experimental astrophysics at the Kavli Institute for Cosmology at the University of Cambridge, UK. “But we found that carbon was formed much earlier – it may even be the oldest metal.”

Astronomers classify elements heavier than hydrogen and helium as metals. Because, apart from hydrogen and a small amount of lithium, these elements are forged inside the fiery furnaces of stars and distributed throughout the universe by stellar explosions called supernovae.

“We were surprised to see carbon so early in the universe, because it was thought that the first stars produced more oxygen than carbon,” Maiolino said. “We thought that carbon would be enriched much later, through completely different processes, but the fact that it appeared so early tells us that the first stars may have behaved very differently.”

To make the discovery, astronomers used JWST to observe an ancient galaxy called GS-z12. Using the telescope’s Near Infrared Spectrometer, the researchers split this early light into a spectrum of colors from which they could read the chemical fingerprint of the early galaxy. What they found in the distant galaxy, which is 100,000 times less massive than the Milky Way, were traces of oxygen and neon mixed with a strong signal of carbon.

“These observations tell us that carbon could have been enriched rapidly in the early universe,” said lead author Francesco D’Eugenio, an astrophysicist at the Kavli Cosmology Institute. “And since carbon is the building block for life, it doesn’t necessarily mean that life evolved much later in the universe. It probably emerged much earlier – although if there was life elsewhere in the universe, it might have evolved very differently than we know. It happened on Earth.”

Ha Thu

According to Live Science

Source: https://tienphong.vn/tim-thay-carbon-vao-buoi-binh-minh-cua-vu-tru-su-song-co-the-xuat-hien-som-hon-nhieu-post1645153.tpo