JAKARTA - NASA's James Webb Space Telescope and its international partners unraveled the mystery when the early universe, gas between stars and galaxies did not penetrate light, where energetic starlight could not penetrate it.
However, one billion years after the Big Bang, the gas became completely transparent. The Webb telescope gets galactic stars emitting enough light to heat and ionize the gas around them.
A team of scientists led by Simonmble of ETH Zörich in Switzerland discovered the latest insight into the time period known as the Age of Reionization, as the universe underwent dramatic changes.
After the Big Bang, the gas in the universe became very hot and dense. For hundreds of millions of years, the gas cooled. Then, the universe achieved repetition.
Gas has returned to heat and ionization, possibly due to early star formation in the Galaxy and for millions of years it has become transparent. Scientists have long been looking for definitive evidence to explain this transformation. The results of new research effectively pulled the curtain at the end of the reionization period.
"Webb not only clearly shows that this transparent region is found around galaxies, we have also measured how large it is," explained the team's first author, Daichi Kashino of Nagoya University, Japan, quoted from the NASA page, Tuesday, June 13.
"With Webb data, we see galaxies reionizing the gas around them," he added.
This transparent gas region is very large compared to galaxies. Webb Telescope data shows that these relatively small galaxies encourage reionization, clearing the vast area of space around it.
Over the next hundred million years, the transparent bubble continued to grow bigger, eventually uniting and causing the entire universe to become transparent.
Korya's team deliberately targeted the time before the end of the Reionization Era, when the universe was not so clear and not too opaque that contained gas patches in various circumstances.
Scientists directed the Webb Telescope towards the quasar, a very bright active supermassive black hole that functions like a large flashlight, highlighting the gas between the quasar and the telescope.
As the quasar light moves towards the telescope through different gas plots, it is absorbed by opaque gases or moves freely through transparent gases.
Furthermore, the scientists' breakthroughs combined Webb Telescope data on central quasar observations of the WM Keck Observatory in Hawaii, the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope and the Magellan Telescope at the Las Campanas Observatory, both on Chile.
"By illuminating the gas along our line of sight, the quasars provide us with broad information on the composition and state of the gas," explained another paper's author Anna-Christina Eilers of MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Later, scientists used the Webb Telescope to identify galaxies near this line of sight and showed galaxies were generally surrounded by transparent areas with a radius of about 2 million light-years.
In other words, the Webb Telescope witnessed galaxies clearing the surrounding space at the end of the Reionization Era.
As an illustration, the area that has been cleared by the galaxies is roughly the same as the distance between the Milky Way galaxy and its closest neighbor, Andromeda.
Until now, scientists have no definitive evidence of what caused the reionization, before Webb Telescope data showed it, they weren't sure exactly what caused it.
Throughout the study, Eilers used Webb Telescope data to confirm the black hole in the quasar at the center of the field was the most massive known today in the early universe, weighing 10 billion times the mass of the Sun.
We still can't explain how quasars grew so big at the beginning of the history of the universe. That's another puzzle that must be solved!," said Eillers.
They, scientists will soon explore research on galaxies in five additional areas, each anchored by the central quasar.
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