NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) reached far back into the universe’s past and captured a galaxy whose light took 13.3 billion years to reach Earth. When MACS0647-JD was first discovered in 2012, it set a new distance record for the most distant galaxy seen in the universe at that time.
Astronomers have had a field day since Webb became fully operational by NASA, because of all the amazing images and data it has been sending back to Earth. The telescope was designed to be able to detect weak infrared light from extremely distant galaxies, in order to provide more information about the early universe. Now, one of the most recent photos taken by JWST takes astronomers 5.6 billion light-years from Earth to a galaxy far, far away.
MACS0647-JD was first spotted 10 years ago with the help of the Hubble telescope, but at the time it appeared only as a pale red dot, according to Dan Coe, who helped discover the galaxy. He commented: “We could tell it was very small, just a tiny galaxy in the first 400 million years of the universe. Now we look with Webb and are able to resolve TWO objects!” Coe is helping to determine whether these two objects are galaxies or two groups of stars within a galaxy.
Hubble image of MACS0647-JD in 2002 Tiger Hsiao of Johns Hopkins University noted that the colors between the two objects differ in color. Notice that one is more blue, while the other is more red. Hsiao stated, “The blue one actually has very young star formation and almost no dust, but the small, red object has more dust inside and is older.” It goes to suggest that what could be happening is a merger of galaxies in the early universe.
Coe adds that due to the gravitational lensing of the mammoth galaxy cluster, it appears three times in the image (shown in the image above as JD1, JD2 and JD3).
Rebecca Larson, a National Science Foundation fellow and doctoral student at the University of Texas at Austin, described her favorite part of looking at Webb images as when you “look down at the bottom, there are all these little dots, and these dots. they’re galaxies!” He added that Webb’s team has yet to try to focus on one place for a long time, so images like this are just the beginning.