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Written by a group of researchers led by Joris Wittstockcosmologist at the University of Cambridge, UK, the discovery of carbonaceous dust with redshifts 4-7 places special constraints on models and scenarios of dust production in the early universe.
One billion years after the Big Bang, which is called the Cosmic Dawn, is a critical point in the 13.8 billion-year history of the universe. In the beginning, atoms were formed; Then, with the formation of the first stars, the first lights shone in the darkness; But it took some time for stars to produce elements heavier than hydrogen and helium.
In the hot core of the center of stars, atoms collide with each other and in a process known as stellar nuclear fusion, heavier elements are created; But these heavier elements remain in it until the end of the star’s death, and after their death, they are scattered in space. This process is usually time-consuming.
Wittstock and his colleagues used the James Webb Telescope to study dust during the Cosmic Dawn, but to their surprise, they made an unexpected discovery. They observed a strong signature of carbon-rich dust in their optical absorption spectrum, which corresponds to early galaxies within 800 million years after the Big Bang.
According to previous ideas, the formation of dust particles takes hundreds of millions of years, and the characteristics of the mentioned galaxies are very young for the formation of dust; But it is not impossible to solve this problem.
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