{"id":11176,"date":"2022-11-17T19:14:41","date_gmt":"2022-11-17T11:14:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wp-productionenv-bjg9h2g2bgg5b8aa.southeastasia-01.azurewebsites.net\/news\/james-webb-space-telescope-spots-what-may-be-most-distant-galaxy-yet-found\/"},"modified":"2022-11-17T19:14:41","modified_gmt":"2022-11-17T11:14:41","slug":"james-webb-space-telescope-spots-what-may-be-most-distant-galaxy-yet-found","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/news\/james-webb-space-telescope-spots-what-may-be-most-distant-galaxy-yet-found\/","title":{"rendered":"James Webb Space Telescope spots what may be most distant galaxy yet found"},"content":{"rendered":"

STORY WRITTEN FOR CBS NEWS & USED WITH PERMISSION<\/p>\n

\"\"
What appears to be the most distant galaxy yet detected shows up as a small red blob in this James Webb Space Telescope image. Data analysis indicates the galaxy was shining just 350 million years after the Big Bang birth of the cosmos, some 50 million years earlier than the previous record holder. Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, Tommaso Treu (UCLA); image processing: Zolt G. Levay (STScI)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The James Webb Space Telescope has spotted a remote galaxy shining just 350 million years after the birth of the cosmos 13.8 billion years ago, surprising astronomers who are struggling to figure out how stars and galaxies could have formed so rapidly in the wake of the Big Bang, researchers said Thursday.<\/p>\n

\u201cThese observations just make your head explode,\u201d Paola Santini, a co-author of a paper describing the discovery in the Astrophysical Journal Letters, said in a statement. \u201cThis is a whole new chapter in astronomy. It\u2019s like an archaeological dig, and suddenly you find a lost city or something you didn\u2019t know about. It\u2019s just staggering.\u201d<\/p>\n

No one yet knows when the first stars turned on after the so-called \u201cdark ages\u201d ended and light first began to travel freely through the universe. But \u201cI think anything earlier than 100 million years would just be really weird,\u201d Garth Illingworth, a Webb astronomer and professor at the University of California Santa Cruz, told reporters.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe were mostly thinking a couple of hundred million years was likely to be where the very first things formed,\u201d he said. \u201cBut these galaxies potentially are so massive that it may push us back earlier than that two hundred. This is really a great open question \u2014 when did the first stars form? And so these galaxies, I think, will be a pathfinder to that.\u201d<\/p>\n

The galaxies in question are GLASS-z12, shining 350 million years after the Big Bang, and another dating back to 450 million years, discovered after just four days of analysis as part of the Grism Lens-Amplified Survey from Space, or GLASS, observing program.<\/p>\n

As the name implies, the extremely distant galaxies were found in light being gravitationally magnified, or \u201clensed,\u201d by the mass of a nearer galaxy cluster. The two observations straddle the previous Hubble record holder, galaxy GN-z11, which was dated to about 400 million years.<\/p>\n

The ages of the newly discovered galaxies are not yet fully confirmed \u2014 additional spectroscopic analysis is required for that \u2014 but astronomers said the observations show clear signs of numerous potentially older galaxies, which would push star formation back even closer to the Big Bang.<\/p>\n

\u201cThese galaxies would have had to have started coming together maybe just 100 million years after the big bang,\u201d Illingworth said in the NASA statement. \u201cNobody expected that the dark ages would have ended so early. The primal universe would have been just one hundredth its current age. It\u2019s a sliver of time in the 13.8 billion-year-old evolving cosmos.\u201d<\/p>\n

Tommaso Treu, principal investigator for the GLASS project and a professor at the University of California at Los Angeles, said the survey was meant \u201cto be a way for the astronomical community to get a quick look at what surprises the universe had prepared for us.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cAnd the universe and JWST did not let let us down,\u201d he said. \u201cAs soon as we started taking data, we discovered there are many more luminous distant galaxies than we had been expecting. Somehow, the universe has managed to form galaxies faster and earlier than we thought.<\/p>\n

\u201cJust a few 100 million years after the Big Bang there are lots of galaxies. JWST has opened up a new frontier, bringing us closer to understanding how it all began. And we have just started to explore it.\u201d<\/p>\n

The James Webb Space Telescope is the most powerful space observatory ever launched, equipped with a segmented 21.3-foot-wide mirror and four sensitive cameras and spectroscopic detectors operating at less than 50 degrees above absolute zero.<\/p>\n

The ultra-low temperature is required to enable the telescope to capture faint light that has been stretched into the infrared region of the spectrum by the expansion of space itself over the life of the cosmos.<\/p>\n

Launched on Christmas Day\u200b last year, JWST is in its fifth month of science operations.<\/p>\n

\u201cJWST has been a gift that has taken months to unwrap and the result was that almost across the board, the observatory is more powerful than our pre-launch expectations,\u201d said Jane Rigby, Webb operations project scientist at NASA\u2019s Goddard Space Flight Center.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe images are sharper, the pointing and guiding are more stable, with darker skies, darker backgrounds and greater, better sensitivity.\u201d The initial results from the GLASS project, she added, \u201care just some of the flood of new discoveries that are pouring in. Just as we hoped,\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

STORY WRITTEN FOR CBS NEWS & USED WITH PERMISSION What appears to be the most distant galaxy yet detected shows up as a small red blob in this James Webb Space Telescope image. Data analysis indicates the galaxy was shining just 350 million years after the Big Bang birth of the cosmos, some 50 million years earlier […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11176","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11176"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11176"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11176\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11176"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11176"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11176"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}