NASA James Webb Space Telescope It is uncovering bright, ancient galaxies that have been hidden from view until now, including galaxies that formed 350 million years after the Big Bang.
If the results hold true, astronomers said Thursday, this group of newly discovered stars will outpace the most distant galaxy identified by the Hubble Space Telescope, a record 400 million years after the universe began.
The Webb telescope, launched last December as a successor to Hubble, suggests that stars may have formed earlier than previously thought, perhaps within two million years of the Big Bang.
The recent inventions of the web Described in The Astrophysical Journal Letters by an international team led by Rogan Naidoo of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. The paper describes two exceptionally bright galaxies, one formed 350 million years after the Big Bang and another 450 million years after.
Naidoo said more infrared observations of Webb would be needed before a new record holder could be claimed.
Scientists said that although some researchers claim to have discovered the closest galaxies to the formation of the universe 13.8 billion years ago, these candidates have yet to be verified. NASA Press conference. They noted that some of them may be later galaxies mirroring earlier galaxies.
It’s a very dynamic moment,” said Garth Illingworth of the University of California, Santa Cruz, co-author of the paper published Thursday. There are a lot of raw reports of early galaxies out there, and we’re still trying as a society to figure out which ones are real.
The evidence so far for the galaxy, believed to have formed even 350 meters after the Big Bang, is “as solid as they come,” said Thomas Drew of the University of California, Los Angeles, a principal scientist in the Webb Early Science Program . “
If the results are verified and there are still early galaxies out there, Royd and his team write that Webb “will prove highly effective in pushing the cosmic frontier to the brink of the Big Bang.”
‘One of the most intriguing questions is when and how did the first galaxies form,’ the researchers wrote.
These galaxies were “hidden at the limits of what Hubble can do,” noted Jane Rigby of NASA, Webb project scientist.
“They were there waiting for us,” he told reporters. “So it’s surprising that these galaxies have so much to study.”
The $10 billion observatory — the largest and most powerful telescope ever sent into space — sits in solar orbit about 1 million miles (1.6 million kilometers) from Earth. Full science operations began in the summer and NASA has released a series Incredible shots Universe.
