Astronomers report the most distant known galaxies — detected and confirmed by the James Webb Space Telescope. As the most powerful space telescope ever built, NASA’s James Webb features unparalleled abilities to observe the most distant galaxies in the Universe, much like a cosmic time machine.
An international team of astronomers has used data from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope to report the discovery of the earliest galaxies confirmed to date. The light from these galaxies has taken more than 13.4 billion years to reach us, as these galaxies date back to less than 400 million years after theEarlier data from Webb had provided candidates for such infant galaxies.
The observations resulted from a collaboration of scientists who led the development of two of the instruments on board Webb, the Near-Infrared Camera and the Near-Infrared Spectrograph . The investigation of the faintest and earliest galaxies was the leading motivation behind the concepts for these instruments.
“For the first time, we have discovered galaxies only 350 million years after the big bang, and we can be absolutely confident of their fantastic distances,” shared co-author Brant Robertson from the University of California Santa Cruz, a member of the NIRCam science team. “To find these early galaxies in such stunningly beautiful images is a special experience.”
They then used the NIRSpec instrument, for a single observation period spanning three days totaling 28 hours of data collection. The team collected the light from 250 faint galaxies, allowing astronomers to study the patterns imprinted on the spectrum by the atoms in each galaxy. This yielded a precise measurement of each galaxy’s The universe is expanding, and that expansion stretches light traveling through space in a phenomenon known as cosmological redshift.
Hubble Deep Field Image. Released on January 15, 1996. Credit: R. Williams , the Hubble Deep Field Team and NASA
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