James Webb Space Telescope has another achievement under its best in just a few months after being launched. The space observatory has now pictured the oldest galaxy humanity has ever seen. And it's unlike anything we ever expected.
The galaxy, dubbed "GLASS-z13" is situated 13.5 billion light-years away from us. How is it the oldest galaxy observed by humans? The light captured by James Webb emanated from the galaxy 300 million years after the Big Bang, when the universe was extremely young.
What James Webb saw is essentially how the galaxy looked during the formative stages of the universe. The previous record for recording the oldest galaxy was set by Hubble Telescope in 2016. This discovery beat that one by about 100 million years. That galaxy is called GN-Z11.
The new image is full of discoveries, for it challenges many assumptions about how galaxies are created, how quickly they grow, and how many such galaxies humanity can discover in far-off universe.
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In a preprint paper, Harvard University astrophysicist Rohan Naidu explained how the first few million years after the Big Bang have remained elusive for humanity to understand. Until now, we only had data from Hubble when it saw GN-Z11. Based on that information, astronomers believed that such ancient galaxies would be dim, scarce, and small.
But GLASS-z13 has challenged this understanding, for it is extremely bright, with researchers calling it "remarkably luminous." Besides GLASS-z13, James Webb also found another super bright young galaxy called GLASS-z11. This takes the total number of earliest galaxies known to humanity to an astounding three, just seven months into James Webb's launch.
Quite simply, galaxies could have started forming much earlier than our previous assumptions. To check this, they created computer models based on data from Webb's NIRCam instrument. They found that 300-400 million years after the Big Bang, each galaxy had already formed a collection of stars with a total mass of around 1 billion times of our Sun.
Also read:?Hubble Ups Game To Compete With James Webb, Captures A Gravitationally Lensed Galaxy
"JWST observations may identify relatively bright galaxies to much earlier epochs than might have been anticipated," the researchers wrote. But in many ways, the data does match previous assumptions. For starters, the galaxies are smaller than the Milky Way, as thought. In addition, they're disc shaped without spiral arms, an understanding held by scientists of old galaxies for quite some time.
What do you think about the oldest galaxy to be seen by humanity? Let us know in the comments below.??For?more in the world of?technology?and?science, keep reading?Indiatimes.com.
References
Smith, K. (2022, July 20). Webb Telescope data reveals oldest galaxy ever seen ¡ª and it¡¯s not what astronomers expected. Inverse.?