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James Webb telescope spots galaxies near the dawn of time, thrilling scientists

Old_JoeOld_Joe
in Off-Topic
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The reddish dot is a newly discovered galaxy seen as it was 350 million years after the Big Bang.
New baby pictures of the universe, taken by the James Webb Space Telescope, show that galaxies started forming faster and earlier than expected.

The telescope launched back in December and it now orbits the sun about a million miles away from Earth. Its giant mirror allows it to detect faint light that's been traveling for almost the entire history of the 13.8 billion-year-old universe. That means it can effectively see what galaxies looked like way back in time.

The snapshots captured so far have both thrilled and perplexed scientists, because it turns out that many luminous galaxies existed when the universe was very young.

"Just a few hundred million years after the Big Bang, there are already lots of galaxies," says Tommaso Treu, an astronomer at the University of California at Los Angeles. "JWST has opened up a new frontier, bringing us closer to understanding how it all began."

In research papers published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, Treu and other astronomers report the discovery of one galaxy that dates back to just 450 million years after the beginning, and another that dates back to 350 million years.

That latter discovery broke a record set by the Hubble Space Telescope in 2016, when it managed to glimpse a galaxy called GN-z11, which existed about 400 million years after the Big Bang.

Astronomer Garth Illingworth of the University of California Santa Cruz was a member of the team that found GN-z11, and says that seeing it was "a huge surprise." But now, with the help of their new space telescope, scientists know it wasn't just a weird outlier — because they have at least two more examples.

"These galaxies we're talking about are bright, and so they were hiding just under the limits of what Hubble could do," says Jane Rigby, an operations project scientist for the James Webb Space Telescope. "They were right there waiting for us."

Link to NPR Article

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