NASA’s New Space Telescope Nancy Grace Roman Just Sent Its First Image

Very recommendable! Amazing stuff!

(7) NASA’s New Space Telescope Just Sent Its First Image — And It Looks Strange - YouTube

A cosmic neutrino of unknown origins smashes energy records detected by the new deep-sea neutrino telescope KM3Net

Amazing stuff!

"Packing a punch of some 220 million billion electron volts, this particle was around 20 times as energetic as the highest energy cosmic neutrinos seen before ... The particle was glimpsed by the partially built Cubic Kilometre Neutrino Telescope, or KM3NeT. ..."

From the abstract:

"The detection of cosmic neutrinos with energies above a teraelectronvolt (TeV) offers a unique exploration into astrophysical phenomena. Electrically neutral and interacting only by means of the weak interaction, neutrinos are not deflected by magnetic fields and are rarely absorbed by interstellar matter: their direction indicates that their cosmic origin might be from the farthest reaches of the Universe.

High-energy neutrinos can be produced when ultra-relativistic cosmic-ray protons or nuclei interact with other matter or photons, and their observation could be a signature of these processes.

Here we report an exceptionally high-energy event observed by KM3NeT, the deep-sea neutrino telescope in the Mediterranean Sea, which we associate with a cosmic neutrino detection.

We detect a muon with an estimated energy of 120 petaelectronvolts (PeV). In light of its enormous energy and near-horizontal direction, the muon most probably originated from the interaction of a neutrino of even higher energy in the vicinity of the detector.

The cosmic neutrino energy spectrum measured up to now falls steeply with energy. However, the energy of this event is much larger than that of any neutrino detected so far.

This suggests that the neutrino may have originated in a different cosmic accelerator than the lower-energy neutrinos, or this may be the first detection of a cosmogenic neutrino, resulting from the interactions of ultra-high-energy cosmic rays with background photons in the Universe."

A cosmic neutrino of unknown origins smashes energy records "Such high-energy neutrinos could offer insight into the universe’s most cataclysmic phenomena"

Observation of an ultra-high-energy cosmic neutrino with KM3NeT (open access)

Fig. 1: Views of the event.

James Webb captures first direct images of galaxies born at Cosmic Dawn challenging some dominant theories

Amazing stuff! New telescopes, new insights!

When will humans have answers for the fundamental question of what came before the Big Bang?

It appears, I found the preprint of this research article: Extreme damped Lyman-α absorption in young star-forming galaxies at z=9−11 (unfortunately, the authors did not update the preprint to match the journal article)

"For the first time in the history of astronomy, researchers at the Niels Bohr Institute have witnessed the birth of three of the universe's absolute earliest galaxies, somewhere between 13.3 and 13.4 billion years ago.  ..."

From the Perspective abstract:

"Hydrogen in the intergalactic medium, the diffuse gas that permeates the space between galaxies, exists today in an ionized state. Yet, this hasn’t always been the case. Very early on, approximately 400,000 years after the Big Bang, the intergalactic medium was primarily neutral. The subsequent transition to an ionized universe, known as reionization, lasted about a billion years and remains poorly understood. Ionization occurs when hydrogen absorbs a photon from the far-ultraviolet (UV) region of the electromagnetic spectrum, which breaks the electron-nucleus bond. It is thought that the first stars and galaxies initiated this transformation. ... however ... Heintz et al. report three galaxies harboring substantial reservoirs of neutral hydrogen a few hundreds of millions of years after the Big Bang, a time when this transition is expected to occur. This challenges the role that early galaxies play in the reionization process."

From the editor's note and abstract:

"Editor’s summary

Gas in galaxies provides the raw material for star formation. Galaxies in the early Universe are seen to be forming stars rapidly ..., but the amount of gas they contain is difficult to determine observationally. Heintz et al. analyzed near-infrared spectroscopy of 12 galaxies at redshifts greater than eight, equivalent to less than 600 million years after the Big Bang. They identified three galaxies with characteristic rest-frame ultraviolet absorption caused by neutral hydrogen gas located in and around the galaxy. The high column densities of gas are sufficient to sustain the rapid star formation occurring in those galaxies, but only for a short period. ...

Abstract

Primordial neutral atomic gas, mostly composed of hydrogen, is the raw material for star formation in galaxies. However, there are few direct constraints on the amount of neutral atomic hydrogen (H i) in galaxies at early cosmic times. We analyzed James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) near-infrared spectroscopy of distant galaxies, at redshifts ≳8. From a sample of 12 galaxies, we identified three that show strong damped Lyman-α absorption due to H i in their local surroundings. The galaxies are located at spectroscopic redshifts of 8.8, 10.2, and 11.4, corresponding to 400 to 600 million years after the Big Bang. They have H i column densities ≳1022 cm−2, which is an order of magnitude higher than expected for a fully neutral intergalactic medium, and constitute a gas-rich population of young star-forming galaxies."

James Webb captures first direct images of galaxies born at Cosmic Dawn

Birth of universe’s earliest galaxies observed for first time (original press release) THE UNIVERSE Using the James Webb Space Telescope, University of Copenhagen researchers have become the first to see the formation of three of the earliest galaxies in the universe, more than 13 billion years ago. The sensational discovery contributes important knowledge about the universe and is now published in the prestigious journal Science.

A struggle to reionize the Universe? (Perspective, no public access) Reservoirs of neutral hydrogen may block ionizing radiation from escaping distant galaxies

Strong damped Lyman-α absorption in young star-forming galaxies at redshifts 9 to 11 (no public access)