- James Webb Space Telescope It broke the record for the oldest galaxy ever observed by nearly 100 million years.
- The light from the galaxy, known as GLASS-z13, is 13.5 billion years old, since the universe was young.
- Web Tools This can help astronomers see galaxies that are older and more distant from these galaxies.
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It James Webb Space Telescope, NASA’s new infrared heavyweight peered into the vast expanse and found a 13.5 billion-year-old galaxy, which researchers believe is the oldest galaxy ever discovered. The scientific operation of the powerful telescope began last week.
This cluster of stars, gas, and dust interconnected by gravity dates back 300 million years after the Big Bang. This beats the previous record for the farthest and oldest galaxy ever discovered by 100 million years, a record held by the galaxy known as GN-Z1. When the GN-Z1 was discovered by Hubble Space Telescope In 2016, galactic light took 13.4 billion years to reach Hubble.
Researchers from Harvard and the Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics have shared their findings about a new record-breaking galaxy, called GLASS-z13, in binary form. from publication Posted Wednesday. The scientists also identified another galaxy of a similar age, called GLASS-z11, which also beat the previous record.
“We have found two very interesting candidates for very distant galaxies,” said Rohan Naidoo, one of the researchers who discovered GLASS-z13 in the Webb data. new world. “If these galaxies were at the distance we think they were, then the universe was only a few hundred million years old at that time.”
Researchers say new world These two galaxies are also relatively small compared to our own Milky Way, which is 100,000 light years across. GLASS-z13 is about 1,600 light-years across, while GLASS-z-11 is 2,300 light-years across.
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The red dot, captured by the James Webb Space Telescope, is the oldest galaxy ever observed.
Naidoo dkk., P. Oesch, T. Treu, GLASS-JWST, NASA/CSA/ESA/STScI
“With the advent of JWST, we now have an unprecedented view of the universe thanks to the highly sensitive NIRCam instrument,” according to the researchers. Described in preprint.
It’s still early days for the discovery of the powerful observatory, which Launching on Christmas Day 2021 The scientific operation started last week.
NASA says Webb was able to look further and find galaxies dating back to the first hundreds of millions of years after the Big Bang, helping astronomers understand more about the evolution of galaxies during the life of the entire universe.
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