The James Webb Telescope may have already found the most distant galaxy ever observed

Just a week after revealing the first images of the James Webb Space Telescope, the most powerful telescope ever built, it was already able to find the most distant galaxy ever observed, which existed 13.5 billion years ago. Named GLASS-z13, Rohan Naidoo of the Center for Astrophysics from Harvard University states that it was only about 300 million years after the Big Bang, 100 million years younger than the previous record observed.

promising

He is the lead author of a public data decomposition study, taken from the first James Webb observations in progress, and posted online for all astronomers on the planet. One of the main tasks of this new telescope is to observe the first galaxies that formed after the Big Bang, which occurred 13.8 billion years ago. In astronomy, seeing far is like going back in time. Sunlight, for example, takes eight minutes to reach us, so we see it as it was eight minutes ago. By looking as far as possible, we can thus perceive light as it was emitted billions of years ago.

Light was emitted from this galaxy 13.5 billion years ago. This study has not yet been peer-reviewed, but has been published as a “preliminary version” in order to be quickly available to the expert community. Rohan Naidu said it has been submitted to a scientific journal for publication soon. “Records in astronomy are already faltered.”Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA associate administrator in charge of science, tweeted. “Yes, I tend to just applaud in the face of peer-reviewed scientific findings. But this is very promising!”Added from the study. Another research team also reached the same findings, according to Rohan Naidoo “Give confidence”.

The galaxy was observed by the NiRcam instrument, and it was discovered on the so-called “deep field”, that is, a wider image taken with a long exposure time to detect faint flares. The peculiarity of James Webb is to work only in infrared. Stretches the light emitted from the oldest objects and “shyness” All the way, passing through this wavelength invisible to the human eye. And to paint a picture of this galaxy, the data was so “Translator” In the visible spectrum: it then appears as a red circle, with white in its center. A blurry point in the infinity of the universe.