NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope is finding bright, early galaxies that have been hidden from view until now, including one that may have formed just 350 million years after the Big Bang.
Astronomers said Thursday that if the results hold up, this newly discovered host of stars would surpass the most distant galaxy identified by the Hubble Space Telescope, a record that was formed 400 million years after the universe began .
Launched last December as Hubble’s successor, the Webb telescope indicates that stars may have formed earlier than previously thought, perhaps within a couple of million years after the big bang.
A close-up of two of the newly discovered galaxies. Photo: ESA, Nasa, CSA, STScI/AFP/Getty Images
Webb’s latest findings were detailed in Astrophysical Journal Letters by an international team led by Rohan Naidu of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. The paper details two exceptionally bright galaxies, the first thought to have formed 350 million years after the Big Bang and the other 450 million years later.
Naidu said more infrared observations by Webb would be needed before claiming a new record.
Although some researchers report discovering galaxies even closer to the creation of the universe 13.8 billion years ago, these candidates have not yet been verified, scientists said at a NASA news conference. Some of these could be later galaxies that mimic earlier ones, they noted.
“This is a very dynamic time,” said Garth Illingworth of the University of California, Santa Cruz, who co-authored the paper published Thursday. “There have been many preliminary announcements of even earlier galaxies, and we’re still trying to figure out as a community which ones are likely to be real.”
Tommaso Treu of the University of California, Los Angeles, chief scientist of the Webb Early Launch Science Program, said the evidence presented so far “is as strong as it gets” for the galaxy believed to be ‘has formed 350 meters after the big bang.
If the findings are verified and there are more early galaxies out there, Raidu and his team wrote that Webb “will be very successful in pushing the cosmic frontier to the edge of the big bang.”
A material image from the Webb Telescope’s Near-Infrared Camera showing distant galaxies in the outer regions of the giant galaxy cluster Abell 2744. Photograph: ESA, Nasa, CSA, STScI/AFP/Getty Images
“When and how the first galaxies formed remains one of the most intriguing questions,” the researchers wrote.
NASA’s Jane Rigby, a project scientist with Webb, noted that these galaxies “were hiding just below the limits of what Hubble could do.”
“They were right there waiting for us,” he told reporters. “So it’s a happy surprise that there are so many of these galaxies to study.”
The $10 billion observatory, the largest and most powerful telescope ever sent into space, is in a solar orbit 1 m miles (1.6 m km) from Earth. Full science operations began over the summer, and since then NASA has released a series of dazzling snapshots of the universe.