Scientists have not yet determined the date of the formation of these galaxies (NASA / Twitter)
Scientists have announced that they have discovered what could be one of the first galaxies to form in the universe, thanks to… James Webb telescope NASA’s new satellite.
Astronomer Haujin Yan told a news conference at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Seattle on Monday that “this is the first large sample of asteroids.”for galaxies Candidate to be the first in its formation beyond the range of the Hubble Space Telescope.
Scientists still consider them “candidate galaxies” because the dates of their formation have not yet been confirmed.
In the new list of 87 galaxies discovered by astronomers, some of them could be around 13.6 billion years old, just 200 million years after the Big Bang.
Scientists have studied distant galaxies dating back to the very beginning of the universe, but the discoveries of Yan and his colleagues could shatter those records by a few hundred million years.
Determining a galaxy’s history can be tricky: Its “redshift” is measured, the amount of light it emits that extends into longer red wavelengths, which tells astronomers how fast the galaxy is receding from us in the rapidly expanding universe.
This, in turn, tells astronomers how far the galaxy is from Earth, or more specifically, how far photons (particles of light) must travel from their stars at the speed of light before reaching a near-Earth space telescope, like that of James Webb.
Starlight in the most distant galaxy in this group may have been emitted 13.6 billion years ago, probably shortly after the young galaxy consolidated.
