The earliest stars sprouted to life in the universe a very long time ago. Despite our rapid advancements, we are yet to delve deep into the distant past of our universe. However, the James Webb Space Telescope may just be close to doing this.
Garth Illingworth, an astronomer at the University of California, said during a NASA news conference held on Thursday to discuss the preliminary science findings from the new observatory that they are on track to uncovering galaxies at the earliest times.
(Photo : NASA, ESA, CSA, Tommaso Treu (UCLA))
New Era in Astronomy
Webb's introduction a few months ago ushered in a new era in astronomy as it paved the way for exploring the distant universe at an unprecedented scale.
Astronomers scrambled to find the furthest galaxies in the observable cosmos after the Webb team released its first image of high scientific quality showing many galaxies scattered throughout space.
Some of those early discoveries have now been reported in peer-reviewed research. The GLASS-z12 galaxy, which two different teams of researchers have used early JWST images to date to just 350 million years after the Big Bang, may be one of the earliest finds in the cosmos.
According to the co-author of one of the new papers, Tommaso Treu, a ground-based facility called the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile has provided a "tentative confirmation" of the distance assessment after the detection.
But concluding the deal requires fresh and distinctive JWST data, as noted by Space.com. Images have been studied in the investigation thus far to find GLASS-z12 and other far-off contenders.
Images allow researchers to calculate distances, but in this kind of data, closer galaxies have been known to be mistaken as distant ones.
A more reliable method uses spectra, or the barcode-like smear of light from an item split by wavelength, according to Space.com.
Webb is an expert in this kind of data, but the astronomers must wait while the observatory completes the copious amounts of work that are already scheduled for its first year in space.
Read Also: NASA's James Webb Space Telescope Gets Hit by Micrometeoroids - Is it Damaged?
Extraordinarily Bright Galaxies
Two early galaxies that are extraordinarily brilliant have been discovered by researchers using Webb, and one of them may contain the farthest starlight ever observed.
It is estimated that the galaxies were created 350 and 450 million years after the big bang. These early galaxies, in contrast to our Milky Way, are small and compact, having spherical or disc shapes rather than large spirals, according to NASA.
The first stars may have begun forming in such galaxies around that time, considerably earlier than expected, according to Webb's latest findings, which show that the galaxies would have had to start clumping together around 100 million years after the Big Bang.
Related Article: NASA's James Webb Space Telescope Encounters the Birth of a Fiery Star
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Written by Jace Dela Cruz
