Just a week after the reveal of the first images from the James Webb Space Telescope, the most powerful ever designed, it could have already found the most distant galaxy ever observed, the one that existed 13.5 billion years ago.
Named GLASS-z13, it appears to us to have been only about 300 million years after the Big Bang, 100 million years younger than the previous observed record, said Rohan Naidu of the Harvard Center for Astrophysics.
He is the lead author of a study analyzing public data, taken from James Webb’s early ongoing observations, and published online for every astronomer on the planet. One of the main missions of this new telescope is to observe the first galaxies formed after the Big Bang, which occurred 13.8 billion years ago.
“Records in astronomy are already shaky”
In astronomy, seeing far away 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. If we look as far away as possible, we can perceive light as it was emitted billions of years ago. The light from this galaxy was emitted 13.5 billion years ago.
This study has not yet been peer-reviewed, but was published as a “preprint” for quick access by the expert community. It has been submitted to a scientific journal for publication, Rohan Naidu said.
“Records in astronomy are already failing,” tweeted Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA’s associate administrator for science. “Yes, I tend to applaud only peer-reviewed scientific results. But this is very promising!” he added of the study.
The peculiarity of James Webb is to work only in the infrared. Light emitted by older objects was stretched and “reddened” along the way, passing into this wavelength not visible to the human eye.
To draw an image of this galaxy, the data has been “translated” into the visible spectrum: it then appears as a red and white circular shape at its center. A blurred point in the infinity of the cosmos.
Source: BFM TV
