Hi gray,
graybear13 wrote:
"Can you tell me what the Webb telescope can do to help us understand..."
One of the surprises faced by cosmologists has been the apparent existence of large disk galaxies with very high redshifts. However, a problem for astronomers trying to observe such things has been that as the redshifts of distant sources increase, the wavelengths of their photons are shifted out of the range that the Hubble Space Telescope (and thus its spectrograph) can observe. Fortunately for UB students, one of the design goals of the JWST was to pick up where the Hubble left off -- sources with very high redshifts are literally shifted into an optimal range for the JWST.
Why is this interesting for us?
If the JWST spots large disk galaxies with redshift greater than say, z=15, then the idea that the CMB must be a surface of last scattering released less than 14 billion years ago can no longer be entertained. In other words, inflationary lambda-CDM Big Bang cosmology will have been disproved, and cosmologists will be
ready (
compelled) to consider alternatives.
But wait, there's more. Being optimized for infrared observation, the JWST may be the best tool we'll have, at least for the next 30 years, to prove or disprove the UB model of a superuniverse (Orvonton) being made up of "
immediately recognizable" (
15:3.4) major sector spirals, as I try to sketch
in this video from time 33:16 to 38:18.
PS: recall that "
major sectors" are said to have the potential for about
100 billion inhabited worlds. Since our Milky Way spiral seems to have about 400 billion planet-supporting suns, it seems to tick that major sector box?
fear not
Nigel