Breakthrough: NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has just spotted six massive galaxies in the early universe (pictured) that are so old they shouldn’t exist. Either source (bottom left) could contain as many stars as our own Milky Way today.
Nationalgeographic.co.id – In a new study, an international team of astrophysicists has discovered some of the mysterious objects lurking in images from the James Webb Space Telescope.
The objects are six potential galaxies that appeared very early in the history of the universe. So massive that this object should be impossible under current cosmological theory.
Each of the candidate galaxies may have existed at the beginning of the universe some 500 to 700 million years after Big Bang, or more than 13 billion years ago. They were also gigantic, containing almost as many stars as the modern Milky Way Galaxy.
“These galaxies shouldn’t have had time to form,” said Erica Nelson, an author of the new study and an assistant professor of astrophysics at the University of Colorado Boulder. “You just didn’t expect the early universe to organize itself so quickly.”
Nelson and his colleagues’ findings have been published in the journal Nature pada 22 Februari 2023 dengan judul “A population of red candidate massive galaxies ~600 Myr after the Big Bang.”
The latest discovery isn’t the earliest galaxy observed by James Webb, which launched in December 2021 and is the most powerful telescope ever sent into space. Last year, another team of scientists looked at four galaxies that most likely formed from gas about 350 million years after the Big Bang.
A mosaic collected by James Webb from a region of space close to the Big Dipper, with inserts showing the locations of six new galaxy candidates from the dawn of the universe.
Those objects, however, are literally prawns compared to new galaxies, which contain far less mass than stars.
Researchers still need more data to confirm that these galaxies are as large as they appear, and originate from the distant past. Their early observations offer a tantalizing taste of how James Webb could rewrite astronomy textbooks.
“Another possibility is that these objects are different strange objects, such as faint quasars, which would be just as interesting,” said Nelson.
There’s a lot of excitement going on: Last year, Nelson and his colleagues, hailing from the United States, Australia, Denmark and Spain, put together an ad hoc team to investigate the data James Webb sent back to Earth.
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