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NASA’s Webb Space Telescope is hunting for bright early galaxies that have been hidden from view until now, including one that may have formed just 350 million years after the Big Bang that created the universe.
If the results are confirmed, the newly discovered group of stars would beat the Hubble Space Telescope for the most distant galaxy ever discovered, a record holder that formed 400 million years after the universe formed, astronomers said.
Hubble’s successor, Webb, launched last December, has shown that stars may form earlier than previously thought — perhaps within a few million years of their birth.
Webb’s latest findings are detailed in the Astrophysical Journal Letters by an international team led by Rohan Naidu of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.
The article details two exceptionally bright galaxies, the first thought to have formed 350 million years after the Big Bang and the other 450 million years later.
Mr Naidu said Webb would need to make more observations in the infrared before declaring a new distance record holder.
While some researchers have reported finding galaxies closer to the birth of the universe 13.8 billion years ago, those candidates have yet to be confirmed, the scientists emphasized in a NASA news release.
Some of them, they noted, may be later galaxies that mimicked earlier galaxies.
“These are dynamic times,” said UC Santa Cruz’s Garth Illingworth, a co-author of the article.
“There have been many initial announcements of even earlier galaxies, and we’re still trying as a community to sort out which of these might be real.”
Tommaso Treu of the University of California, Los Angeles, chief scientist of Webb’s early release science program, said the evidence so far suggested that the galaxy is believed to have formed 350 million years after the Big Bang , and thus “already very reliable”.
If these findings are confirmed and more early galaxies exist, Mr. Naidu and his team write, Webb “will prove very successful in pushing the cosmic frontier to the brink of the Big Bang”.
“When and how the first galaxies formed remains one of the most intriguing questions,” they said in their paper.
Jane Rigby of NASA, the Webb project scientist, noted that these galaxies are “hidden below the limits of what Hubble can do.”
“They were waiting for us right there,” she told reporters.
“So, it’s a surprise that there are so many galaxies like this to study.”
The $10bn (£8.4bn) observatory – the world’s largest and most powerful space telescope – is located 1m miles from Earth in orbit around the sun.
The entire science operation kicked off over the summer, and NASA has since released a dizzying series of snapshots of the universe.
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