WEBB TELESCOPE DATA REVEALS OLDEST GALAXY EVER SEEN -- AND IT'S NOT WHAT ASTRONOMERS EXPECTED

11 HOURS AGO

A team of astrophysicists discovered the ancient galaxy in publicly available data from Webb's first science observations.


DURING some of the James Webb Space Telescope’s first scientific observations, a team of astrophysicists just discovered the oldest galaxy ever observed, and it’s a cosmic surprise that challenges key ideas about what the early universe was like.

WHAT’S NEW — The galaxy, dubbed GLASS-z13, is 13.5 billion light years away. Webb saw light from the galaxy as it looked just 300 million years after the Big Bang, when the universe was still very young.

GLASS-z13 beats the previous record by about 100 million years; in 2016, the Hubble Space Telescope discovered a galaxy about 13.4 billion light years away, which astronomers call GN-Z11. But besides smashing yet another cosmic record (something that’s already become routine for Webb, just a week into its 20-year mission), GLASS-z13 smashes some assumptions about when galaxies started to form, how quickly they grew, and how many we can expect to find in the most distant reaches of the universe.

In a recent preprint paper, Harvard University astrophysicist Rohan Naidu and his colleagues describe the first few hundred million years after the Big Bang as “the last major uncharted epoch in the history of the universe.” Until now, astronomers had only observed a single galaxy from that little-known period: good old GN-Z11. Most models predicted that such ancient galaxies would be scarce, small, and dim. But GLASS-z13 is surprisingly bright, so bright that Naidu and his colleagues describe it as “remarkably luminous” in the title of their scientific paper, which is usually a venue for being as dry as possible.

More:
https://www.inverse.com/science/oldest-galaxy-jwst