NASA’S JAMES WEBB TELESCOPE DISCOVERS SIX ANCIENT GALAXIES

The six candidate galaxies, based on observations by Nasa’s James Webb space telescope. Photograph: Nasa/Reuters

Sun 26 February 2023:

The James Webb Space Telescope, launched in 2021, has detected evidence of six massive ancient galaxies, which astronomers are calling ‘universe breakers,’ which can possibly change the existing theories of cosmology.

These objects possibly date to a time when the universe was just three per cent of its current age and are far larger than what was presumed possible for galaxies so early after the big bang, Guardian reported.

If confirmed, these findings would call into question scientists’ understanding of how the galaxies were formed.

Jeo Leja, an astrophysicist at Penn State Univeristy said, “these objects are way more massive than anyone expected.” “We expected only to find tiny, young, baby galaxies at this point in time, but we’ve discovered galaxies as mature as our own in what was previously understood to be the dawn of the universe.”

The observation comes from the first dataset released from NASA’s James Webb space telescope, which is equipped with an infrared-sensing instrument that is capable of detecting light emitted by most of the ancient stars and galaxies.

Dr Erica Nelson from the Univeristy of Colorado Boulder spotted a series of ‘fuzzy dots’ that appeared unusually bright and red.

Redness in astronomy is a proxy for age, which happens as light travels across the expanding universe it is stretched out or red-shifted.

Experts believe that these galaxies appeared to be roughly 13.5 billion years old and about 500-700 million years after the big bang.

This observation is not the oldest galaxies spotted.

Last year, scientists spotted four galaxies that date to about 350 million years after the big bang.

Existing models suggest that after a period of rapid expansion, the universe spent a few hundred million years cooling down enough for gas to coalesce and collapse into the first stars and galaxies began to form, a period known as the dark ages.

“The discovery of such massive galaxies so soon after the big bang suggests that the dark ages may not have been so dark after all, and that the universe may have been awash with star formation far earlier than we thought,” said Dr Emma Chapman, an astrophysicist at the University of Nottingham, who was not involved in the latest observations.

Chapman said that further observations would be required to confirm the discovery before existing models could be abandoned. “Saying that, with the pace that JWST has been upturning theories and revolutionising whole fields, it wouldn’t surprise me if it were true!” she added.

SOURCE: INDEPENDENT PRESS AND NEWS AGENCIES

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