Talk to anyone about galaxies and it often conjurs up images of spiral or elliptical galaxie. Thanks to a survey by the James Webb Space Telescope it seems the early Universe was full of galaxies of different shapes. In the first 6 billion years up to 80% of the galaxies were flat‚ surfboard like. But that’s not it‚ there were others like pool noodles too‚ yet why they looked so different back then is a mystery. Galaxies were  first identified back in the 17th Century by French astronomer Charles Messier. He was a comet hunter who identified a number of fuzzy objects which he realised were not comets. He catalogued them in his famous catalogue of deep sky objects but it wasn’t until Edwin Hubble measure the distances to some of them in the 1920’s that they were recognised as galaxies.  The bluish-white spiral galaxy NGC 1376 hangs delicately in the cold vacuum of space. Credit: NASA‚ ESA‚ and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA) Analysing images from the JWST survey known as the Cosmic Evolution Early Release Science Survey‚ the team studied galaxies from a time when the universe was between 600 million and 6 billion years old. To their surprise they did not see the usual cosmic zoo of galaxies like spiral‚ elliptical and irregular galaxies. Instead they found that between 50 and 80% of the galaxies seem to be glattened in two dimensions. Illustration of James Webb Space Telescope Instead‚ the team found galaxies shaped like surfboards‚ pool noodles‚ frisbees and volleyballs. Among these new types‚ the surfboard shape was most common with the least common being the volleyball‚ sphere shaped galaxies. Interestingly too they foudn that the frisbee and noodle shaped galaxies became more common in the later era around 6 billion years.  The mass of the early galaxies seemed to be far less than the mass of galaxies we see today. It seems they had far less time to grow when compared to today’s galaxies which are far more massive. The team would have not been able to complete their work without the incredible sensitivity and resolution of the JWST. The paper was authored by Viraj Pandya‚ a NASA Hubble Fellow at Columbia University.  They went further to explore what category our own Milky Way galaxy would fall into if we could hop in a time machine and wind back time. They concluded it was likely to have been surfboard shaped galaxy‚ not too dissimilar to the spiral structure familiar to us today. We have learned lots about galaxies over the years and images from Hubble has most certainly helped.  The latest set of images from JWST have shown us that we still have lots to learn and as we delve deeper and deeper into space and further and further back into time we are only just starting to scratch the surface.  Source : Webb Shows Many Early Galaxies Looked Like Pool Noodles‚ Surfboards The post Early Galaxies Looked Nothing Like What We See Today appeared first on Universe Today.

A light in a dark place.

'I want the second most powerful person in the world – who happens to be a woman – [to] tell me, be very, very afraid,' one co-host ridiculously claimed.

President Biden is cruising to the Democratic nomination. Former President Donald J. Trump could begin to wrap up his party’s nod within days. America’s response: This can’t be real. Even as both men stroll toward likely summer coronations and a fall rematch‚ an undercurrent of disbelief is coursing through the country. Many Republicans view Mr. Biden as so politically and physically weak that they think his party will replace him. Many Democrats can’t fathom that Mr. Trump...

Americans are rapidly becoming much more upbeat about the economy. Consumer sentiment leapt 13% in the first half of January from December‚ the University of Michigan said Friday. That came on the heels of a sharp rise in December‚ causing the index to surge a combined 29% from November‚ the biggest two-month increase since 1991. The pickup in sentiment was broad-based‚ spanning consumers of different age‚ income‚ education and geography. The recovery in sentiment “is likely to provide...

Rep. Maria Elvira Salazar (R-FL) kicked Rep. Barbara Lee (D-CA) out of a House committee hearing about relations between the United States and Cuba‚ accusing the California Democrat of spreading “communist propaganda.” On Thursday‚ Lee attended a hearing of the Western Hemisphere Subcommittee of the House Foreign Affairs Committee‚ which she is not a member of‚ and tried to speak on restoring ties between the two countries. Salazar‚ a former journalist‚ has pushed...

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