{"id":165653,"date":"2023-06-12T20:24:45","date_gmt":"2023-06-13T01:24:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2023\/06\/nasas-webb-proves-galaxies-transformed-the-early-universe"},"modified":"2023-06-12T20:24:45","modified_gmt":"2023-06-13T01:24:45","slug":"nasas-webb-proves-galaxies-transformed-the-early-universe","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2023\/06\/nasas-webb-proves-galaxies-transformed-the-early-universe","title":{"rendered":"NASA\u2019s Webb Proves Galaxies Transformed the Early Universe"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/nasas-webb-proves-galaxies-transformed-the-early-universe2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Cave divers equipped with brilliant headlamps often explore cavities in rock less than a mile beneath our feet. It\u2019s easy to be wholly unaware of these cave systems \u2013 even if you sit in a meadow above them \u2013 because the rock between you and the spelunkers prevents light from their headlamps from disturbing the idyllic afternoon.<\/p>\n<p>Apply this vision to the conditions in the early universe, but switch from a focus on rock to gas. Only a few hundred million years after the big bang, the cosmos was brimming with opaque hydrogen gas that trapped light at some wavelengths from stars and galaxies. Over the first billion years, the gas became fully transparent \u2013 allowing the light to travel freely. Researchers have long sought definitive evidence to explain this flip.<\/p>\n<p>New data from the James Webb Space Telescope recently pinpointed the answer using a set of galaxies that existed when the universe was only 900 million years old. Stars in these galaxies emitted enough light to ionize and heat the gas around them, forming huge, transparent \u201cbubbles.\u201d Eventually, those bubbles met and merged, leading to today\u2019s clear and expansive views.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Cave divers equipped with brilliant headlamps often explore cavities in rock less than a mile beneath our feet. It\u2019s easy to be wholly unaware of these cave systems \u2013 even if you sit in a meadow above them \u2013 because the rock between you and the spelunkers prevents light from their headlamps from disturbing the [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":661,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-165653","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cosmology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/165653","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/661"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=165653"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/165653\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=165653"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=165653"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=165653"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}