Month: July 2024

Archaeology News for July 2024: Two stories from Biblical times in the eastern Mediterranean. 

The eastern Mediterranean has always been one of the hotbeds of archaeology surrounded as it is by Greece to the north, Egypt to the south and the lands of the bible to the east. Yet despite over two hundred years of intensive study the eastern Mediterranean still manages to surprise us on occasion. In this post I’ll be discussing two new discoveries that have recently been made in the eastern Mediterranean. As usual I will discuss the earliest study first and move forward in time.

Often called the ‘Cradle of Civilization’ the lands to the east of the Mediterranean have been intensely studied by archaeologists. (Credit: The Latin Library)

We humans took to traveling on the water long before the beginning of recorded history so the story of how the first boats and ships were built can only be uncovered by archaeology. Based upon underwater excavations of ancient shipwrecks it is known that by the late Bronze Age there were ships capable of sailing hundreds of kilometers and carrying tons of cargo conducting regular trade between the people of Egypt, the Hittite empire, Canaan, Troy and Greece.

Modern replicas of bronze age ships have been built by archaeologists in order to test their theories about how much trade between ancient civilizations there was during the Bronze Age. These replica ships have been found to be quite seaworthy! (Credit: Medium)

However it was always thought that those ships never sailed out of sight of land but instead hugged the coastline throughout their journeys. The reasons for this timidity are basically twofold; firstly in case of a storm a ship close to shore could quickly find a harbour or even beach itself for safety. In addition the navigators of that time probably lacked the navigational tools necessary to know where they were and what direction they were going once they were out of sight of land.

One big question about Bronze Age sea trade is, just how far from land did these ancient mariners dare to go? (Credit: Quora)

That’s what makes the recent discovery of a 3,300 year old vessel that had sunk about 90 kilometers off the coast of northern Israel so interesting; the location of the wreck was well out of sight of any land. Another interesting aspect of the discovery is the fact that the wreck was found at a depth of 1,800 meters, with its cargo apparently intact by the London based fossil fuel company Energean which operates underwater natural gas extraction wells in the eastern Mediterranean.

Looking for natural gas the energy company Energean came across a 3,3300 year old shipwreck far off the coast of Israel. (Credit: Marine Insight)

Energean was searching in an area off the coast of Israel for likely new sites for gas wells using an underwater robot when the robot just happened upon the ancient wreck. From what the robot could see the ship is approximately 12-14 meters in length and lays on the ocean floor surrounded by hundreds of earthenware jars that must have held the ships cargo of oil, wine or perhaps fruit.

Nowadays, if we need to go somewhere that could be dangerous for humans we send a robot. It was this robot that actually found the ancient wreck! (Credit: The Times of Israel)

Once the engineers from Energean realized what they had come across they contacted the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA) who announced the discovery of the wreck on the 20th of June. The wreck itself is so deep beneath the ocean’s surface that a comprehensive examination of the ship is probably impossible. However the Energean robot did succeed in bringing up two of the ship’s jars that archaeologists with the IAA have identified as being of Canaanite origin and from about the year 1,300 BCE.

Some of the debris found on the sea floor. The wooden ship itself has decayed so most of what can be seen is pottery that carried the ship’s cargo. (Credit: Haaretz)

The Canaanites were of course the Bronze Age enemies of the Hebrews who lived along the coast of modern Israel and Lebanon. The fact that the wreck was discovered so far from land clearly shows that the ancient mariners of the Bronze Age were not as timid as we had though and that they probably could use the position of the Sun and stars to navigate when they were away from land.

As the enemies of the ancient Hebrews the Canaanites are accused in the Bible of many horrible rituals including sacrificing their children to the god Moloch. By the way don’t confuse the Canaanites with the Philistines, they were two very different people! (Credit: Merrimack Valley Havurah)

Speaking of the enemies of the ancient Hebrews as the Bronze Age turned into the Iron Age the people of Israel and Judah acquired enemies who were much more powerful than the Canaanites. The Iron Age in the Middle East was a time of empires starting with Egypt and followed by the Assyrians, Babylon and Persia.

At the height of their empire the Assyrians controlled much of what today is the Middle East. (Credit: Biblical Archaeology Society)

According to the bible the Assyrians tried to conquer the two Hebrew kingdoms several times before finally subjugating the kingdom of Israel, giving rise to the legend of the ‘lost ten tribes of Israel’. They never succeeded in defeating Judah however despite their king Sennacherib laying siege to Jerusalem in 701 BCE. As told in 2Kings 19:35 the Assyrian army was encamped outside the walls of the city when “the angel of the Lord went out and put to death a hundred and eighty-five thousand in the Assyrian camp.”

The Assyrians tell it a little bit differently. Cuneiform tablets have been found in excavations at the Assyrian capital of Nineveh that relate how king Hezekiah of Judah paid Sennacherib a large tribute, and promised to behave as the Assyrian king’s vassal in order to save the city.

The Assyrians succeeded in their conquests by fast moving attacks using chariots like this one depicted here. (Credit: Science Photo Library)

The truth is probably somewhere in-between but regardless an independent scholar who specializes in Near Eastern Archaeology named Stephen Compton has written an article in the journal Near Eastern Archaeology where he claims to have found the campsite of Sennacherib’s army. Now Mister Compton didn’t go digging around in Israel, instead he studied aerial photographs from the mid 20th century of the area between Jerusalem and the Hebrew town of Lachish that Sennacherib also laid siege to searching for clues as to where the Assyrian army might have camped.

One of the earliest people for whom we can identify a portrait king Sennacherib of Assyria almost succeeded in conquering Jerusalem. The question is, why didn’t he? (Credit: Wikipedia)

What Mr. Compton was looking for in particular was a simple oval wall encompassing an area large enough for an army to camp in but without any permanent structures inside. A temporary city in other words, which is pretty much what an army camp is. Stone reliefs from Nineveh have been found that show that the Assyrians did in fact build oval shaped temporary fortifications for their army during campaigns. The location that Mr. Compton has identified is known locally as the Khirbet al Mudawwara where Mudawwara is an Arabic word that can mean a place where a sultan has placed his army. A memory perhaps of the Assyrians even after 2700 years!

The oval in this Assyrian bas-relief depicts the kind of fortification the Assyrian Army would build as a camp. (Credit: X)
Aerial view of the Khirbet al Mudawwara. Is the oval shape on the right of the image the site of the camp the Assyrians built in order to besiege Jerusalem? (Credit: Live Science)

If Mr. Compton’s discovery does turn out to be true it will be good evidence that the bible, like Homer’s tales, can be used as a guide for the ancient history of the Near East. Provided that is you take into account spin doctoring, exaggeration and the occasional outright falsehood.

Space News for July 2024: Boeing’s Starliner finally reaches the ISS with a Crew Aboard, but not without Problems.

Well Starliner finally made it, the long delayed Boeing space capsule has at last succeeded in taking live astronauts to the International Space Station (ISS). Problem is it hasn’t succeeded in returning them safely to Earth yet. Launched from the Kennedy Space Center on June 5 aboard an Atlas V rocket the Starliner Crew Flight Test (CFT) managed to dock with the ISS the next day and the two person crew of NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams were welcomed by the official crew of the ISS. The launch itself was delayed several times because of faulty valves and leaks in both Starliner and the Atlas V rocket.

Launch of Boeing’s Starliner on its Crewed Flight Test (CFT). The capsule was sent into orbit aboard an Atlas V rocket. Credit: (NASA/Joel Kowsky)

In fact launch was only allowed to go ahead after NASA decided that a helium leak in Starliner did not threaten the mission. Then, during the daylong trip in Low Earth Orbit (LOE) to the ISS Starliner developed another four helium leaks. Finally, as the spacecraft neared the ISS yet another technical issue appeared as five of Starliner’s twenty-eight maneuvering thrusters began to function erratically forcing a two hour delay in docking.

After several problems the Starliner Capsule finally did dock at the ISS.

Because of all those problems NASA decided to delay Starliner’s return, rather than remaining at the ISS for about a week Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams have now spend more than a month at the ISS trying to resolve Starliner’s problems, or at least learn more about them. Officially NASA says that the two astronauts are not ‘stranded’ in space but this situation is certainly without precedent.

While NASA insists that Suni Williams (l) and Butch Wilmore (r) are not ‘Stranded’ at the ISS they nevertheless have spent a lot more time there trying to ‘understand’ Starliner’s problems then anyone originally anticipated. (Credit: Florida Today)

The two astronauts are in no danger; they are perfectly safe at the ISS, they could always be brought back down in a Space X Dragon capsule. If after all of the testing in orbit however NASA finally does decide that Starliner isn’t reliable enough to bring Wilmore and Williams back to Earth it would be a terrible blow to Boeing’s Starliner program, and Boeing itself.

It’s not just Starliner that’s been giving Boeing problems. Their 737 Max airplanes have caused several deadly accidents causing the entire company’s safety program to be called into question. (Credit: NextBigFuture.com)

So Starliner still has problems, but are they serious enough to cause NASA to refuse to certify the capsule for regular operation in the Commercial Crew Program. NASA does not like the idea of entrusting its astronauts to vehicles that have any technical problems, and Starliner obviously still has quite a few. The space agency could require Boeing to conduct one more CFT in the same way that it required Boeing to conduct a second unmanned Orbital Flight Test (OFT) of Starliner back in December of 2019. That decision will undoubtedly have to wait for the final mission review.

Whatever methodology you use to solve a problem a review of everything that happened and everything that was tried is always the last step! (Credit: Humor that Works)

However NASA has been waiting a long time for Starliner to begin conducting regular crew rotation missions to the ISS as a part of the Commercial Crew program. In fact at the beginning of the Commercial Crew Program it was expected that Boeing would contribute the largest part of the missions to the ISS under the program. That’s why the Aerospace giant received the largest development contract, $4.2 Billion USD, while Space X received only $2.6 billion to develop their Dragon capsule. Originally NASA’s schedule called for Starliner to carry out its test flights back in 2017 and begin regular missions to the ISS in 2018, to be followed shortly thereafter by Space X’s Dragon capsule.

NASA’s plan was to have two private companies carrying their astronauts to the ISS. Space X has now conducted nine missions but Boeing has yet to complete a single one! (Credit: NASASpaceFlight.com)

What eventually happened however was that Space X, after a few delays carried out its first regular mission, designated as Crew-1 in November of 2020 and has now successfully conducted nine missions as a part of the Commercial Crew Program. Space X is now contracted to conduct another 14 crew transfer missions before the ISS is officially shut down and de-orbited. The price tag for the remaining 14 Space X missions is set at $258.7 million each or $64.4 million per seat.

With their reusable Falcon 9 first stage Space X has greatly reduced the cost of getting into outer space. (Credit: Statista)

Currently NASA still hopes that Boeing’s Starliner can also participate in regular crew rotation missions to the ISS. Assuming that Starliner does receive certification Starliner’s first crew mission is scheduled for no earlier than 2025 and NASA has contacted Boeing to provide a total of six regular crew missions by 2030. The estimated price tag for a seat on Starliner is approximately $95 million per seat or around $380 million per mission.

In just a few years private space stations will be orbiting our planet. Boeing still hopes to be a part of that future but will Starliner ever be a reliable space system? (Credit: Yahoo)

Even at that price however Boeing is not going to make money on Starliner from the Commercial Crew Program. The added cost of seven years of delays, the extra unmanned OFT and the possibility of NASA requiring a second CFT will certainly cause Boeing to suffer a financial loss. However Boeing is looking beyond this decade to the 2030’s when it is expected that several privately owned space stations will be in orbit and the business of taking astronauts, scientists and even tourists to those stations will become much more profitable. Boeing had better fix its capsules remaining problems though; it already has competition in Space X’s Dragon and Sierra Nevada’s Dreamchaser mini-shuttle is scheduled to make it’s first, unmanned flight later this year.

Boeing has more competition than just Space X, Sierra Nevada’s Dreamchaser is scheduled to make its first, unmanned flight later this year. (Credit: Wikipedia)

Before I go I just want to mention some good news concerning everybody’s favourite space probe that could, Voyager 1. You’ll recall that back in November the Voyager probe began radioing back a data stream that made no sense to the Voyager team at the Jet Propulsion Labouratory (JPL). See my post of 9 September 2023. Well after a lot of effort on the part of the engineers at JPL in April they managed to correct the problem to the extent that Voyager was back in communication with Earth.

Even after 45 years the two Voyager spacecraft are still sending back useful data about conditions in interstellar space! (Credit: Science in the news- Harvard University)

 Even with that success however, there was still a considerable amount of work to be done before the probe was fully repaired. Now, on June 14th NASA announced that Voyager 1 is fully functional and sending back useful measurements about the void of interstellar space which it was the first of all human made objects to ever reach.

Book Review: ‘A City on Mars’ by Kelly and Zach Weinersmith

I’m not certain as to whether or not to classify ‘A City on Mars’ by Kelly and Zach Weinersmith as Science Fiction. You see ‘City on Mars’ is actually an overview of the many problems we humans are going to have to overcome if we really want to settle outer space. Right now we are at the very beginning of that endeavor; we currently have two small, emphasis on small, space stations that are crewed by rotating teams of astronauts about every six months. In other words nobody is actually living in space at this moment. So in a sense that makes ‘A City on Mars’ kinda fictional, doesn’t it?

While ‘A City on Mars’ is definitely not this kind of Science Fiction it’s still a book about the future, so it is sorta Science Fiction! (Credit: OverDrive)

No matter, Kelly and Zach Weinersmith are a pair of space enthusiasts who have done a lot of delving into the challenges that humans are going to face trying to settle, they don’t like the term colonize because of its political baggage, outer space. Having started out as proponents of space settlement they freely admit that the number and scale of those challenges has made them a lot more cautious.

Cover Art for ‘A City on Mars’ by Kelly and Zach Weinersmith. (Credit: Wikipedia)

In ‘A City on Mars’ the problems of space settlement are classified into three broad categories, Physiology or can humans live and multiply long term in space, where to live in space and how, and finally, what are the legal aspects of building a settlement in space. You might wonder about the inclusion of that third class, after all isn’t space the final frontier and therefore kinda lawless? However the legal challenges may be the toughest of all, if we’re going to do it without starting any wars between space powers, nations that just happen to be nuclear powers as well.

Most people’s idea of what a city on Mars would look like. Actually if you read ‘A City on Mars’ you’ll find out that there are a few problems with this sort of design! (Credit: Asia Times)

Starting with the question of whether humans can live long term in space it’s worth remembering that back in the 1950s, right before the space age began, many medical experts were convinced that humans could not survive for more than a few minutes in zero gravity. Without gravity, they said, you couldn’t even swallow, you’d get disoriented, dizzy and be unable to perform any task. Finally, without gravity your heart would race at double the normal pulse rate until before long you’d have a heart attack.

In the 1950s no one had ever been into space so we had no idea if even the toughest person could survive more than a few minutes there. Because of that ignorance the original Mercury 7 astronauts were subjected to a battery of medical tests to ensure they were in the best of health. (Credit: NASA)

Fortunately it didn’t work out that way. By the time the first men walked on the Moon it was obvious that people could survive zero gravity for several weeks with the only impediment being some temporary weakness when you returned to Earth.

Readjusting to Earth’s gravity after a year in space isn’t easy, as Scott Kelly can tell you. Zero gravity causes your muscles and bones to weaken so that a lifetime in space may simply not be physically possible. (Credit: Geekwire)

However, living in zero gravity for the rest of your life may be another matter. You see, thanks to our space stations we now have lots of data about people living in zero gravity for six months to a year at a time and it’s becoming clear that our bodies aren’t built for living there. Bone mass loss appears to be the biggest problem but there is muscle loss as well, and that’s despite astronauts putting in several hours of exercise every day. There’s also the way that fluids in your body redistribute themselves in zero gravity and that includes the shape of your eyeball causing vision problems. Of course NASA is doing a lot of medical research to find treatments to remedy these problems but it’s clear that our bodies are not built to live in zero gravity long term.

The astronauts who landed on the Moon did not so much walk on its surface as hop like bunny. Still the Moon has some gravity. Whether or not it’s enough to prevent our muscles and bones from deteriorating is still questionable. (Credit: WHYY)

But what if we if build settlements on the Moon or Mars, they have gravity after all, it’s not as strong as Earth’s but it’s still more than zero gravity? Well the problem there is that the longest anymore has spent in partial gravity was about three days on the Moon. We have no idea about whether Lunar or Martian gravity is strong enough to prevent or even lessen any of the problems stated above.

In the Movie 2001: A Space Odyssey a Lunar base is already well established. That obviously didn’t happen and it may take a long time to come! (Credit: Kitbashed)

There’s another big issue about which we have no data at all and that’s the question of trying to have children, and raise them in outer space. While it’s true that a fetus in the womb is kinda sorta in zero gravity still there’s that business of the mother’s fluids being redistributed along with her loss of bone and muscle. Then, once the child is born how will they grow in zero or partial gravity, could a child born and raised on Mars ever acquire enough muscle to be able to visit Earth? To date no experiments related to breeding and raising animals have been conducted in space so we literally know nothing about whether it can be done.

The biggest medical question however is, can a human being, born and raised on the Moon or Mars, ever grow strong enough to come home to Earth and survive our planet’s strong gravity! (Credit: Raising Children Network)

Assuming we can live and multiply somewhere in space the question now becomes where and how. After a quick review of the various choices in our solar system ‘A City on Mars’ settles on the Moon and Mars because the two of them are the closest to Earth in both distance and conditions. The problem is that even then the Moon and Mars are horrible places to live. As far as trying to live there is concerned they are both airless, waterless deserts where even the sky and ground are trying to kill you. Any people living there will have to build themselves strong shelters equipped with the means of providing air, water and food while keeping a livable temperature, oh and shielding its inhabitants from cosmic radiation.

There’s been a lot of talk over the last few years about water ice at the bottom of some Lunar craters. Probably more talk than there is water ice! If that ice is there it would make a small fraction of one percent of the Moon’s surface extremely valuable! (Credit: YouTube)

‘A City on Mars’ also takes a chapter to discuss the choicest real estate on the Moon. You may have heard recently about how space nations are really interested in the Moon’s south pole. That’s because it’s thought that the bottom of some of the craters there may have been in complete darkness for billions of years so that there may be water there in the form of ice. Also, some of the peaks of those craters may be in almost perpetual sunlight making them the perfect places to build solar arrays for power. The fact that those areas represent less than one tenth of one percent of the Moon’s surface makes them extremely valuable, valuable enough to be the cause of violence?

Everybody loves ‘Star Wars’ don’t they. If we start fighting over the Moon or Mars however most of the fighting will probably be here on Earth! (Credit: Forbes)

Which brings me to the legal aspects of settling space. Of course so far there hasn’t been much need for the long arm of justice in space. That’s because there are only three nations that have the ability to send people into space and those nations have all made certain that the people they send are law abiding and can be expected to behave themselves while in space. Nevertheless, as more actors gain access to space, such as Space X, the race to obtain what little resources there are in space may lead to conflict.

It’s amazing how quickly the private corporation Space X has come to dominate space exploration. In the future there is going to be more private investors in space, more guests at the table wanting more of the few resources readily available. That could certainly provoke violence! (Credit: Dreamstime.com)

The governing legal document covering the exploration of space right now is actually called the Outer Space Treaty or OST and it was ratified in 1967 by the only two space powers at the time, the USA and the USSR. Since that time another 110 countries have signed on including all of the major space nations. Shortly after its creation the OST was supplemented by several other agreements known as the Rescue Agreement, the Liability Convention and the Registration Convention.

Yes there really is an “Outer Space Treaty’ and here’s the first page. (Credit: Alamy)

So how are these treaties going regulate the way that human beings settle space? The short answer is that the OST forbids anyone from owning any part of any celestial object, in other words no ‘I claim this crater in the name of King and Country’. On the other hand anyone can explore and make use of space, so Ireland for example has the right to set up a exploratory outpost basically anyway on the Moon, but they don’t even control the ground directly beneath that outpost! Obviously that could lead to a fair amount of misunderstanding if Vietnam decides to set up their outpost in exactly the same spot as Ireland’s!

Land grabs here on Earth have caused more than a few wars. It would be naive to think that we’ll behave any better in outer space. (Credit: Grain.org)

What the authors of ‘A City on Mars’ have discovered is that there isn’t a lot of rules and regulations that will govern how we settle space, which could lead to a ‘wild west’ scenario complete with shoot outs that trigger full-scale wars, between nuclear powers, back here on Earth. Remember Spain, Portugal, France, Holland and England fought a number of wars in Europe that began in the New World.

What we call the French and Indian War and Europe calls the Seven Years War was just one of the many wars started over disputes for land in the New World by Old World Powers! By the way it was a young George Washington, on the white house above, who started the French and Indian War. (Credit: American Battlefield Trust)

So there are a lot of problems that are going to have to be solved before humans settle space and most of them do not involve rockets or robots or spacesuits or cool technical things like that. If you’d like to know more about those nasty little details, and some of the possible solutions I think you’d like to read ‘A City on Mars’.

Astronomy News for June 2024: New Discoveries by the James Webb and Euclid Space Telescopes.

We’ve gotten used to big discoveries about the Universe being made by space telescopes. Hubble, the Chandra X-ray and the Kepler planet hunting telescopes have all revolutionized our picture of Universe, both near and far, big and small. Now it’s NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) along with the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Euclid space telescope that are making the discoveries so in this post I’ll be discussing one from each. I’ll start with JWST.

Orbiting more than a million kilometers from Earth the new James Webb Space Telescope is making observations that are revolutionizing Our understanding of the Universe. (Credit: NASA)

Although it will be making other observations the JWST was primarily designed to peer back further in time than Hubble or any ground-based telescope can. How does JWST look backward in time? Well since the speed of light is a finite 3×108 m/s you’re actually always doing that. You see if you look at the Moon you’re actually not seeing the Moon as it is but the Moon as it was about a second and a half ago because that’s how long it took the light that’s entering your eyes to get from the Moon to you!

At the speed of light our solar system is no more than a few light hours away. The universe however is more than 13 billion light years across. The farther away something is, the farther back in time you’re seeing it! (Credit: Amazon.com)

Similarly if you look at the planet Jupiter you’re really seeing it as it was about 35 minutes ago, because Jupiter is so far away that it takes light about 50 minutes to get from the planet to your eyes. The brightest true star in the sky is Sirius at a distance of about 10 light years so that means when you look at Sirius you’re really looking 10 years into the past. Finally, if you manage to find the Andromeda galaxy, the furthest object you can see with your unaided eye, you’ll be looking about two and a half million years into the past!

The Andromeda galaxy is so distant that it takes light 2.5 million years to get from there to Earth. So when we look at Andromeda what we see is the galaxy as it was 2.5 million years ago. (Credit: BBC Sky at Night Magazine)

So, when astronomers want to see what conditions were like in the early Universe, less than a billion years after the Big Bang let’s say, all they have to do is look far enough away. About 13.5 billion light years away if our calculations are right about the Big Bang. There are a couple of problems with that however, first of all the further away something is the smaller and dimmer it will appear to be, so you’ll need a bigger telescope. Oh, and you’d better put your telescope in space because the gas molecules moving around in Earth’s atmosphere will just smear whatever images you try to take.

The gas molecules in our atmosphere are moving rapidly all the time. As light tries to pass through them it gets knocked about, something called dispersion. That’s why photographs of distant objects look fuzzy when compared to images of close objects. This effects the images astronomers take of celestial objects as well. (Credit: Makodeny.org)

There’s a second more subtle problem as well caused by the expansion of the Universe that’s called the Doppler effect. Now the Doppler effect is familiar enough to everyone. Picture yourself standing on a sidewalk and a police car or ambulance is coming toward you with its siren blaring. As the vehicle is coming toward you the siren’s pitch is quite high but as it goes past the tone drops noticeably. What is happening is that the sound waves are squeezed together as the car approaches you but then are pulled apart as it recedes. That’s the Doppler effect and it happens to light waves as well as sound.

We’re all familiar with the Doppler effect. It the reason that sirens have a higher pitch as they’re approaching, and a lower pitch as then are moving away. (Credit: The Physics Classroom)

Since the Universe itself is expanding that causes all but a very few nearby galaxies to move away from us and that causes the light from those receding galaxies to get shifted to the red. For a galaxy that’s more than 10 billion light years away it’s visible light, the light we’d like to observe it by, gets shifted all the way into the Infrared requiring much more complicated equipment to make observations. That’s why the JWST was built the way it was and placed into an orbit that’s over a million kilometers from Earth.

Astronomers can measure the redshift of distant galaxies by looking for the shift of the spectral lines of the elements in the light coming from those galaxies. This gives them a very precise measurement of the velocity of that galaxy away from us. (Credit: Wikipedia)

It’s been almost two years now since JWST began its task of studying the early Universe and the first results are starting to get published. In particular it was announced on the 30th of May that JWST had broken its own record for discovering the farthest, and hence youngest galaxy ever observed. The galaxy has been given the designation of JADES-GS-z14-0 and it is estimated to have existed a mere 290 million years after the Big Bang.

The most distant galaxy observed so far, JADES-GS-z14-0 formed less than 290 million years after the Big Bang. (Credit: X.com)

Now JADES-GS-z14-0 is a small galaxy compared to modern galaxies like the Milky Way or Andromeda, being measured at about 1,600 light years across and only having a mass of a couple of million stars. Unlike other early galaxies, which appear to get most of their light from gas falling into the supermassive black hole in their center, JADES-GS-z14-0 seems to get its light from millions of very bright, young stars.

Bright, young stars being formed inside a gaseous nebula. (Credit: SciTechDaily)

The fact that such a well developed galaxy could have formed in such a short time after the Big Bang has a lot of early Universe theorists scratching their heads but there it is, and it appears certain that JWST will discover more of them in the days to come. So our models of how the first galaxies came into being are just going to have to change to account for the observable facts.

Theories are generated from facts, observations, not the other way around! (Credit: Quora)

In the same way new observations by the ESA’s Euclid space telescope are upending some of our ideas about how stars form in the present Universe. You see fifty years ago our models of star formation basically started with a gas cloud in the Milky Way collapsing due to gravity. As the cloud condensed it split into smaller clouds each of which was just big enough to then condense further into a star and maybe some planets. At that time we weren’t even certain how many stars had planets.

Forty years ago we weren’t certain any other stars had planets but now we know of thousands of exoplanets, these are just some that we think might have life on them. (Credit: SETI Institute)

Back then some astronomers suggested that there might be objects smaller than stars roaming interstellar space, objects too small to ignite the nuclear fire that makes stars shine so they would be dark. These proposed objects were given the name Brown Dwarf stars, but nobody knew how to find them. Well over the last decade or so we’ve found a couple of dozen and so brown dwarfs are now a recognized part of the celestial zoo. (See my posts of 22September 2021 and 19August 2023 for more about Brown Dwarf stars)

Too big to be a planet, yet too small to be a star Brown Dwarfs are a hot topic of research because we aren’t certain just how many of these objects there are roaming around our galaxy! (Jet Propulsion Labouratory)

So if brown dwarfs are real that begs the question, are there even smaller objects floating through space, planet sized objects that either never belonged to a star or that somehow got kicked out of their solar system. These objects have been named rogue planets and the Euclid space Telescope has discovered seven of them, so far!

Rogue Planets, planets roaming the Galaxy but not orbiting any star are the latest addition to the Celestial Zoo. (Credit: Wikipedia)

Just imagine an object, just about the size of our Earth that for billions of years has been traveling through the galaxy without the warmth of any star, cold and alone. Some astronomers are already suggesting that our galaxy may contain more than a trillion such rogue planets. After all with the mass of a single star you could make hundreds of thousands of planets so if the stellar nurseries that produce the stars also make rogue planets there probably are more of them out there than the stars.

Our Milky way galaxy contains over 200 billion stars that we can see. The question is, how many other objects does it also contain that we can’t see? (Credit: EarthSky)

Every time we look at the Universe with newer, better instruments we find new and unexpected objects out there to understand.