Certain! The James Webb Space Telescope has captured the oldest known galaxies
Astronomers have confirmed that four ancient galaxies discovered by the James Webb Space Telescope in its first months of operations are the oldest scientists have ever seen and are almost as old as the universe itself.
The galaxies They were among hundreds of promising star clusters found in images from the Near Infrared Camera (NIRCam) aboard NASA. James Webb Space Telescope (Web or JWST). But scientists were only able to confirm that these ancient objects were really as old as they appeared after they looked at them in detail using near infrared spectrometerwhich revealed their chemical composition and determined how quickly these galaxies were moving away from Webb.
Astronomers now know that the light from the four galaxies took more than 13.4 billion years to reach Webb. More precisely, the telescope sees the galaxies as they appeared only 350 million years from now the great explosionWhen Universe It was only 2% of its current age, although galaxies must have started forming even earlier.
Related: Scientists say the James Webb Space Telescope is revealing the oldest galaxies in the universe like never before
Observing such young stellar families is exactly what Webb was built for, and scientists are excited that it began providing such remarkable results so early in its operations.
“these [galaxies] “With JWST, for the first time we can now find such distant galaxies and then confirm through spectroscopy that they really are far away,” Brant Robertson, an astrophysicist at the University of California Santa Cruz and one of the researchers involved in the observations, said in a statement.
To be sure that the galaxies were really as old as they seemed, astronomers had to get accurate estimates of the so-called redshift From NIRSpec data. Redshift makes objects moving away from us appear redder as a result of the expansion of the universe, which stretches light from distant stars and galaxies into longer, redder wavelengths of the light spectrum.
The most distant galaxies Webb detected showed a redshift of 13.2, which corresponds to an age of about 13.5 billion years – the highest ever measured for any galaxy.
“At redshift 13, the universe is only 325 million years old,” said Robertson.
The observations were made as part of the JWST Advanced Deep Extragalactic Survey (JADES) project, which uses NIRCam and NIRSpec to study the early universe in ways that were previously impossible.
An international collaboration of more than 80 astronomers, JADES is only at the beginning of its endeavor. Next, the astronomers want to look at the individual stars In those galaxies, some may have been born 100 million years earlier than the age Webb saw.
“With these measurements, we can know the intrinsic brightness of galaxies and know how many stars they have,” said Robertson. “Now we can begin to map out how galaxies come together over time.”
Robertson added that the observations match what astronomers have expected based on current galaxy formation models.
In the NIRCam observations, the team also identified galaxies that appear to be older than those now confirmed, but the ages of these galaxies have not been verified by the more accurate spectral measurements from NIRSpec.
The new findings will be presented Monday (December 12) at the Space Telescope Science Institute conference in Baltimore.
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