CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) – NASA’s Webb Space Telescope is finding bright, early galaxies that have been hidden from view until now, including one that may have formed as little as 350 million years after the cosmic Big Bang.
Astronomers said Thursday that if the results are verified, this newly discovered star cluster will beat the most distant galaxy spotted by the Hubble Space Telescope, a record holder that formed 400 million years after the universe began.
The Webb Telescope, launched last December as Hubble’s successor, suggests that stars may have formed earlier than previously thought—perhaps within a few million years of formation.
Webb’s latest discoveries were detailed in the Astrophysical Journal Letters by an international team led by Rohan Naidu of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. The article discusses two extremely bright galaxies, the first believed to have formed 350 million years after the Big Bang and the other 450 million years after.
Naidu said more infrared observations from Webb are needed before he can claim a new distance record holder.
Although some researchers report that they have uncovered galaxies even closer to the creation of the universe 13.8 billion years ago, these candidates have yet to be verified, scientists stressed at a NASA press conference. Some of them could be later galaxies that mimic older ones, they noted.
“This is a very dynamic moment,” said Garth Illingworth of the University of California, Santa Cruz, a co-author of the paper published Thursday. “There have been many preliminary announcements of even older galaxies, and we’re still trying to sort out as a community which ones are likely to be real.”
University of California, Los Angeles’ Tommaso Treu, lead scientist for Webb’s early release science program, said the evidence presented so far “is as solid as it gets” for the galaxy believed to have formed 350 million years 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 prove extremely 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 their paper.
NASA’s Jane Rigby, a project scientist with Webb, noted that these galaxies “were just below the limits of what Hubble could do.”
“They were there waiting for us,” he told reporters. “So it’s a pleasant surprise that there are so many of these galaxies to study.”
The $10 billion observatory — the world’s largest and most powerful telescope ever sent into space — is in a solar orbit 1 million miles (1.6 million kilometers) from Earth. Full science work began over the summer, and NASA has since released a series of dazzling snapshots of the universe.
