Webb Found Giants That Turned Darkness into Light ⚡ экспресс
Webb caught light from two galaxies that has been traveling to us since the universe was just 600 million years old. In that light, the 'fingerprints' of supermassive stars appeared—like ripples on water from a hurricane, but carved by stellar winds. So, in the young cosmos, did these colossal stellar beacons shine at every turn?
The light from two galaxies, caught by the James Webb telescope, traveled 13 billion years to us, beginning just 600 million years after the Big Bang. Breaking this light into colors (spectral analysis), astronomers saw not just distant galaxies but true lighthouses: within them blazed giant stars.
It turned out that stellar heavyweights, 200–300 times the mass of the Sun, raged there. Their ferocious winds and fierce ultraviolet light left clear fingerprints in the emitted helium and other elements. Like colossal searchlights, they pierced through the surrounding cold hydrogen, clearing their path and making the universe transparent. Without these giants, the expanding cosmos would have remained a murky hydrogen broth, never giving rise to smaller stars or planets.
The irony is that they lived only a moment—about one and a half million years, shorter than the blink of a cosmic eye. Yet it was this ultra-bright flare that ignited light in the previously impenetrable darkness and forever changed the face of the universe.
🎯 Today's record-holder R136a1 is 265 times heavier than the Sun, but the young universe churned out such stars by the hundreds—they were commonplace.