5 Surprising Facts About The First Galaxies In The Universe
“1.) There are no rocky planets present among the very first stars and galaxies. Whenever you form stars from a molecular cloud of gas, you can fully expect that gas to fragment into a whole slew of clumps, which grow at different rates depending on how large they are to begin with and what else is in their vicinity. Large gas clouds will grow stars and planets of many different sizes, but even the smallest worlds that first form will be made exclusively of gas: hydrogen and helium. Without any previous generations of stars, there are no heavier elements to form solid bodies like rocky planets or moons. Small balls of gas may form, but when those stars ignite, they’ll simply be burned off into interstellar space by the ionizing radiation of those first nuclear fires in the Universe.”
Looking farther and farther into the distant Universe is the equivalent of looking farther and farther back in time. Although Hubble has shown us galaxies from when the Universe is just 400 million years old, and satellites to measure the Cosmic Microwave Background can show us a snapshot at 380,000 years, we have no information about what’s in between. That means, to date, we have yet to see the Universe’s first stars and galaxies! While James Webb will shed a new cosmic light on that era, allowing us to view these galaxies for the first time, there are some pieces of information that we already know. These galaxies must be tiny compared to the ones we have today; they will never be seen by Hubble, even with an infinite amount of observing time; they should already contain the seeds of supermassive black holes from their inception; and they very likely contain the most massive stars found in the entire Universe.
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