The James Webb Space Telescope breaks its own record in discovering the earliest galaxies ever to exist

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has discovered a handful of possible galaxies that could be among the earliest to ever exist.

Located 13.6 billion light years away and only 200 million years after Big BangThe five candidate galaxies are the earliest galaxies ever discovered and likely some of the first to form in the ancient universe.

If confirmed by follow-up observations, the ancient galaxies will offer astronomers a test of their best powers Theories of galaxy formation along with unique insights into the way matter first coalesced in the cosmos. The researchers published their results on November 26th at the Preprint database arXivTherefore, they have not yet been peer reviewed.

“According to the standard paradigm of structure formation, the same primordial fluctuations that gave rise to hot and cold spots in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) will eventually grow, collapse, and form the first galaxies during the cosmic dawn, initiating the epoch of first light,” write the researchers in their study.

“These first galaxies remained beyond our observational range for decades,” they added. But the JWST has changed that.

Cosmologists previously estimated that the first star clusters began to merge and form galaxies just a few hundred million years after the Big Bang.

Related: The James Webb Telescope discovers a “galaxy turned inside out” shortly before the beginning of time.

Then, just 1 to 2 billion years after the universe began to exist, current theories suggest that these early protogalaxies reached adolescence and formed into dwarf galaxies that devoured each other to grow into ones like our own.

However, determining the exact timing of this process and the speeds at which the first steps occurred is challenging because the light from these galaxies is so faint and their wavelengths have been dramatically extended (or redshifted) into the infrared spectrum by the expansion of the Universe .

Unlike its predecessor, the Hubble Space Telescope, JWST can detect light in the infrared spectrum, giving the telescope access to the earliest stages of the universe. But the light from the extremely early epochs of our universe is still too faint to be detected on its own.

To get around this, the researchers behind the new observations, conducted as part of the Galactic Legacy Infrared Midplane Survey Extraordinaire (GLIMPSE) project, took advantage of a phenomenon known as gravitational lensing to magnify the distant light of these early galaxies .

As Einstein pointed out in his Theory of general relativityGravity is the curvature and distortion of space-time in the presence of matter and energy. This curved space, in turn, determines how energy and matter move.

This means that light travels in a straight line, but can be bent and enlarged by gravity. In this case, the Abell S1063 galaxy sits between their chosen region and our solar system, concentrating the early galaxy’s light so it can be viewed with telescopes.

By pointing JWST at this region of curved space and slowly collecting light from behind it, astronomers pushed the telescope to the limits of its capabilities and captured the first faint glimmers of early galaxies.

If further studies confirm this, these candidate galaxies will be younger than the earliest confirmed galaxyJADES-GS-z14-0, around 90 million years ago – making them among the very first that could ever be formed. And the fact that they were all found in the same region of the sky suggests that there could be many more of them out there.

How could galaxies like this grow so quickly? Answers to the cosmic mystery remain elusive, but it is unlikely that this will be the case destroy our current understanding of cosmology. Instead, astronomers are toying with explanations that include the earlier-than-expected appearance of giant black holes, feedback from supernova explosions, or even the influence of black holes dark energy to explain the rapid formation of stars within them.

The James Webb Space Telescope breaks its own record in discovering the earliest galaxies ever to exist

ByAmelia Journalton

By Amelia Journalton

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