James Webb Telescope captures oldest galaxy
After its first images spread like wildfire across the internet, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is believed to have broken the record for the oldest galaxy ever detected.
Scientists from the Harvard and Smithsonian Center of Astrophysics have identified a 13.5-billion-year-old galaxy called GLASS-z13, which dates to 300 million years after the Big Bang.
The previous record-holder was a galaxy known as GN-Z1, spotted by the Hubble Space Telescope in 2016, with its light taking 13.4 billion years to reach Hubble.
The team of researchers, who shared their findings in a pair of preprints published on Wednesday, also identified another galaxy, GLASS-z11, which is roughly the same age as GLASS-z13.
"We found two very compelling candidates for extremely distant galaxies," Rohan Naidu, one of the researchers who detected GLASS-z13 in Webb's data, told New Scientist.
The red circle captured by the James Webb Space Telescope is believed to be the oldest galaxy ever observed. Image: Naidu et al, P. Oesch, T. Treu, GLASS-JWST, NASA/CSA/ESA/STScI
"If these galaxies are at the distance we think they are, the universe is only a few hundred million years old at that point."
Researchers told the publication that these two galaxies are relatively small compared to the Milky Way galaxy, which is 100,000 light-years wide. In comparison, GLASS-z13 is approximately 1600 light-years wide, while GLASS-z11 is 2,300 light-years in diameter.
"With the advent of JWST, we now have an unprecedented view of the universe thanks to the extremely sensitive NIRCam instrument," researchers explained in the preprint.
Though the JWST commenced science operations in mid-July, it is expected that it will help scientists uncover more about the universe’s age and evolution.
NASA attributes this to its ability to peer further back in time - as far as the first few hundred million years after the Big Bang - allowing for the discovery of previously unseen galaxies.
Image: Naidu et al, P. Oesch, T. Treu, GLASS-JWST, NASA/CSA/ESA/STScI