NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has discovered an “undetected” group of galaxies dating back to the early universe.
The telescope opened the door to a new chapter in astronomy by discovering a galaxy that formed only 350 million years after the Big Bang, making it the farthest light of stars ever seen by man.
This galaxy, identified with another galaxy that appeared 450 million years after the Big Bang, is exceptionally bright, indicating that it met only 100 million years after the event that ignited the universe 13.8 billion years ago.
Both galaxies, the farthest and therefore the oldest, named GLASS-z12, appear in the image as faint orange spots in the blackness of space, and they would not have been seen without the powerful James Webb telescope’s ability to look back in time with its infrared camera.
The team, led by the National Institute of Astrophysics in Rome, Italy, said the discovery resembled an “undiscovered country” of early galaxies that had been hidden until now.
It is estimated that GLASS-z12 is about 50 million years older than the previous record-holder, GN-z11, identified by the Hubble Space Telescope and Keck Observatory in 2016, which formed 400 million years after the Big Bang.
The ages of the two galaxies mean that they are markedly different from our own and the more mature galaxies that surround us today. They are of a completely different shape, for example, they can be crushed into fields or disks much smaller than our galaxy.
They also turn gas into stars very quickly. It may have started producing stars just 100 million years after the universe appeared – roughly 14 billion years ago.
This indicates that the universe is starting to light up faster than expected. The reason for its brightness is still unclear. It may be massive with many low-mass stars, or smaller but with far fewer bright stars.
Scientists hope to answer these questions and learn more through more detailed observations from the James Webb Telescope. The new discoveries come from data collected just days after it began its observations.
Two papers describing the findings have been published in Astrophysical Journal Letters.
Source: The Independent