"One of the most fascinating things about the Universe is that whenever we look at it in a novel way - in new wavelengths of light, with greater resolution, or with superior sensitivity - we give ourselves the opportunity to be surprised. Instead of merely finding fainter or more distant versions of what we had already established was out there, we often find things that we didn't even know we ought to be looking for previously."
"In particular, with its superior infrared capabilities, JWST has revealed to us a plethora of ultra-distant galaxies: including nearly all of the currently most-distant astronomical objects. While the most discussed puzzles about these ultra-distant galaxies has been their great abundance and extreme brightness, another aspect that's just as puzzling is their dust content. In particular, with so little star-formation having occurred over such a short time period, the key question is, "how do these galaxies make so much dust, and so soon?""
JWST's superior infrared capabilities have revealed a large population of ultra-distant galaxies, many of which are unexpectedly abundant, bright, and dusty. The presence of substantial dust so early is puzzling because limited time elapsed for star formation and typical dust sources. A recent study examined the dust properties of a nearby galaxy and identified a counterintuitive pathway that can produce large dust masses rapidly. Observations of local dust production and survival processes provide a template for how early galaxies could attain significant dust content within the first few hundred million years after the Big Bang. The mechanism reconciles JWST observations with dust-formation physics.
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