(ORDO NEWS) — The James Webb Space Telescope has discovered four of the most distant galaxies ever observed, one of which formed just 320 million years after the Big Bang.
Since its launch on December 25, 2021, the James Webb Space Telescope has provided astronomers with a wealth of new scientific data about the furthest corners of space, allowing humanity to study the distant past of our universe.
The fact is that even the speed of light is not infinite, and by the time light from very distant objects reaches our planet, millions or even billions of years have passed for us.
So when we look at a shining galaxy, we see it as it was in the distant past.
Using the NIRCam instrument , which captures infrared radiation, “James Webb” was able to fix four of the galaxies farthest from the Milky Way from all that have ever fallen into the lens of terrestrial telescopes.
They formed less than half a billion years after the Big Bang , while the current universe is already about 13 billion years old.
The most distant of the four galaxies, named JADES-GS-z13-0, formed just 320 million years after the Big Bang. And this is the most distant space object of all that astronomers have recorded.
All four galaxies are extremely small: their mass is “only” 100 million times that of the sun, while the mass of the Milky Way (far from the largest known galaxy) is more than 1.5 trillion times the mass of the sun.
These extraordinarily active galaxies (the stars in them are formed surprisingly quickly) are very poor in metals, which is consistent with the ideas of scientists: JADES-GS-z13-0 and its neighbors had very little time for heavy metal atoms to form in the depths of their stars.
The discovery of such galaxies can be considered a real technical breakthrough, because now only 300 million years of unexplored history separate earthly astronomers from the Big Bang.
Perhaps in the future, James Webb and similar telescopes will be able to confirm the existence of even more ancient galaxies, allowing the history of the universe to be recorded from the very beginning.
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