CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) — NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has detected bright early galaxies previously hidden from view, including galaxies that may have formed just 350 million years after the Big Bang.
On Thursday, a group of astronomers said that if the results are verified, this discovery will exceed the most distant galaxy discovered by the Hubble Space Telescope, which identified a galaxy that formed 400 million years after the beginning of the universe.
The Webb telescope, launched in December 2021 as successor to the Hubble telescope, has found hints that stars may have formed earlier than previously thought — perhaps in the first two million years after creation.
An international team led by Rohan Naidoo of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics detailed Webb’s latest findings in The Astrophysical Journal. The article describes two exceptionally bright galaxies, the first probably 350 years after the Big Bang and the other about 450 million years later.
Naidoo said more infrared observations by Webb are needed before he can say this is a new distance record.
Although some researchers have reported that they have discovered galaxies closer to the creation of the universe 13.8 billion years ago, these candidates have not yet been verified, as scientists confirmed at a NASA press conference. They added that some of them may be later galaxies similar in appearance to early galaxies.
“It’s a very dynamic time,” said Garth Illingworth of the University of California, Santa Cruz, a co-author of Thursday’s paper. “There have been many preliminary announcements about previous galaxies and we are still trying as a society which ones are likely to be real.”
The evidence presented so far is “as strong as it gets” for the galaxy, which is believed to have formed 350 million years ago, said Tommaso Trio, of the University of California, Los Angeles, and lead scientist for Webb’s Early Science Program. After the big bang.
If the discoveries are verified and there are more early galaxies, Naidoo and his team write that Webb “will prove tremendously successful in pushing the cosmic frontier to the brink of the Big Bang.”
“When and how the first galaxies formed remains one of the most intriguing questions,” they said in the article.
These galaxies were “hidden beyond the limits of what Hubble could do,” noted NASA scientist Jane Rigby, project specialist at Webb.
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