The James Webb Space Telescope has set a new record by capturing images of objects that existed when the universe was just over 200 million years old.
“We are stepping into completely uncharted territory, and we cannot be certain about what we will find,” scientists describe their new research surrounding five objects that may be some of the first galaxies in the universe.
Analyzing data from the James Webb Space Telescope – a pioneering spacecraft developed and operated by NASA – a research team from the United States, France, Sweden, Switzerland, Denmark, Australia, and Israel has made unprecedented discoveries.
These are five bright red objects with an extraordinary redshift never seen before.
Illustration of a high redshift galaxy with actual images on the left, capturing the five ancient objects recently discovered in James Webb data – (Image: NASA/ESA/CSA).
Redshift occurs due to the expansion of the universe, causing the wavelengths of light from distant objects to stretch and appear in the red part of the electromagnetic spectrum.
Thus, the red hue of these five objects indicates their ancient nature. Subsequent calculations suggest that these five objects could be five ancient galaxies that existed in the universe 13.6 billion years ago.
This figure surpasses the previous record held by the galaxy JADES-GS-z14-0, which was recorded in the universe approximately 13.52 billion years ago.
This time frame also corresponds to an unprecedented distance that the James Webb’s gaze has reached.
At the moment the light that formed the images of these five objects began its journey to Earth—approximately 13.6 billion years ago—they were only a certain number of light-years away from us.
However, due to the expansion of the universe, today, if they still exist, they would be about 34 billion light-years away.
Estimating the exact age of these galaxies, or determining when they formed before being observed, remains challenging.
According to Dr. Hakim Atek from the Paris Astrophysics Institute, a co-author of the study, based on estimates of the universe’s age and the limits that allow galaxies to begin forming, they could be at most 150 million years old at the moment they were observed.
“Ultimately, these observations will impose stringent constraints on the physical processes allowed in our cosmological model,” Dr. Atek told Space.com.
According to Dr. Vasily Kokorev from the University of Texas (USA), the lead researcher, the increasing number of high-redshift galaxies discovered by James Webb indicates that their quantity in the first few hundred million years of the universe is greater than expected.
This suggests that the early universe was a rapidly evolving, explosive world rather than a monotonous one as previously thought.
The discovery of these five candidate galaxies is part of a large sky survey called GLIMPSE, aimed at searching for ancient objects, with James Webb being enhanced by the foreground galaxy cluster Abell S1063.
Abell S1063 is located 4 billion light-years away and acts as a “gravitational lens,” magnifying objects behind it thanks to its immense gravitational force, bending spacetime.
