In the deep field of the sky scanned by the James-Webb Space Telescope, each bright spot is a galaxy, some of which are very primitive, born shortly after the big bang. NASA, ESA, CSA, and M. Zamani (ESA/Webb). Science: B. Robertson (UCSC), S. Tacchella (Cambridge), E. Curtis-Lake (Hertfordshire), S. Carniani (Scuola Normale Superiore), and the JADES Collaboration.
DECRYPTION – NASA’s space observatory has identified clusters of stars formed very shortly after the big bang, in the prime youth of the Universe.
It’s now official, and published in a top science journal, the new James-Webb Space Telescope (JWST) sees farther than its predecessor, Hubble. The huge and complex craft, designed and manufactured by NASA and sent into space by the European Space Agency in December 2021, discovered the most distant galaxy ever observed in the Universe. But, more than the distance, it is its age that interests astronomers. And the new record holder, dubbed JADES-GS-z13-0, is the oldest known galaxy, formed very soon after the big bang. On the scale of the age of the Universe, formed 13.8 billion years ago, this “very short time” is still equivalent to a period of 320 million years.
« Our main objective with the James-Webb is to search for the cosmic dawn, the period after the big bang when the first stars and the first galaxies are formed. », explains Stéphane Charlot, CNRS research director at…
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