The James Webb Space Telescope finds the two oldest and most distant galaxies The James Webb Space Telescope

NASA James Webb Space Telescope Find the first bright galaxies that have been hidden from view until now, including galaxies that may have formed as little as 350 million years after the Big Bang.

Astronomers said Thursday that if the results are confirmed, this newly discovered cluster of stars would surpass the most distant galaxy identified by the Hubble Space Telescope, a record that was set 400 million years after the universe began.

The Webb telescope, launched last December as a successor to the Hubble telescope, indicates that stars may have formed earlier than previously thought, perhaps within two million years of the Big Bang.

The latest web discoveries Detailed in the astrophysicist journal letters An international team led by Rohan Naidu of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. The paper describes two exceptionally bright galaxies, the first believed to have formed 350 million years after the Big Bang and others 450 million years later.

Naidoo said more infrared observations of Webb are needed to claim the new record holder.

The scientists said in the journal NASA Press conference. They indicated that some of them are later galaxies mimicking earlier galaxies.

“This is a very dynamic moment,” said Garth Illingworth of the University of California, Santa Cruz, who co-authored the paper released Thursday. “There are many early reports of older galaxies, and we’re still trying to decide as a community which ones might be real.”

The evidence presented so far is “strong” for the galaxy, which is thought to have formed 350 meters after the Big Bang, said Tommaso Treu of UCLA’s Webb Science Early Release Program.

If the results are confirmed and more early galaxies exist, Raido and his team write that Webb “will prove very effective in pushing the cosmic boundary to the edge of the Big Bang.”

‘When and how the first galaxies formed is still one of the most interesting questions,’ the researchers write.

These galaxies were “hidden beneath the limits of Hubble’s capabilities,” noted Jane Rigby, a NASA research scientist and project scientist for Webb.

“They were waiting for us there,” he told reporters. “So it’s a happy surprise that there are so many galaxies to study.”

The $10 billion observatory, the largest and most powerful telescope ever sent into space, orbits the sun about 1 million miles (1.6 million km) from Earth. Full science operations began this summer, and NASA has released a series since then Breathtaking footage Universe.